Question

A simple and short question: If a view contains two or more sub views. Should the view container be a layout view?

If not, what are good alternatives?

Update:

my code:

var LikeButtonModal = Backbone.Model.extend({
    url: 'api/profile/like/'
});

var LikeButton = Backbone.Marionette.ItemView.extend({
    tagName: 'button',
    className: 'like',
    template: '<div>like</div>',
    events: {
        'click' : 'like'
    },
    initialize: function(userId){
        this.model = new LikeButtonModal();
    },
    like: function(){
        this.model.save();
    }
})

var LeftProfileView = Backbone.Marionette.Layout.extend({
    template: '#profile-left',
    regions:{
        extra : '.extra'
    },
    initialize: function(){
        this.on("item:rendered", this.editable, this);
    },
    onRender: function(){
        if(this.model.get('userid') != ActiveUser.get('userid')){
            this.extra.show(new LikeButton(this.model.get('userid')));
        }
    }
});

Answer 1

Layouts are good for this if you will be replacing the sub-views at different times, or if the sub-views are very different types… for example, a layout might contain your header, your navigation and your main content region.

Other options are CollectionViews and CompositeViews.

Collection views will render a collection of items, using the same type of view for each item in your collection. This works well for lists of things.

CompositeViews are CollectionViews that can render a wrapper template around the collection. For example, an HTML table structure. The table, thead, tbody and tfooter tags can be rendered in the CompositeView’s wrapper template, and then a collection of items can be rendered in to the tbody tag.

This might shed a little more light on the subject, too: https://github.com/derickbailey/backbone.marionette/wiki/Use-cases-for-the-different-views