Question

app.myView = Backbone.View.extend({
   events: {
   'mouseenter .myitem': 'myfunction'
   }    
});

how do i delay this event from being created until a certain time or until I decide that i’d like to create it. right now it is created as soon as my view is loading in and the mouseevent is triggering as soon as I enter .myitem

Answer 1

Backbone binds view events using delegateEvents:

delegateEvents delegateEvents([events])

Uses jQuery’s on function to provide declarative callbacks for DOM events within a view. If an events hash is not passed directly, uses this.events as the source.
[…]
When delegateEvents is run again, perhaps with a different events hash, all callbacks are removed and delegated afresh — useful for views which need to behave differently when in different modes.

You can call delegateEvents whenever you want to change the event bindings. So one way to do this would be to adjust this.events and call this.delegateEvents():

add_event: function() {
    this.events = _({}).extend(this.events, {
        'mouseenter .myitem': 'myfunction'
    });
    this.delegateEvents();
}

The extend call is a good idea because Backbone.View.extend will leave the events attached the view’s prototype so simply changing this.events:

this.events['mouseenter .myitem'] = 'myfunction';

would alter the events for all instances of the view. The advantage of this is that calling undelegateEvents will do the Right Thing and all your view events will be handled the same way.

Demo: http://jsfiddle.net/ambiguous/Bd4SB/