Question

I am starting to learn knockout js and i am planning to build a mid size application like catering 1000 users and 1000 entries. I was wondering how do you guys structure you js files for knockout js application? It is like a conventional MVC file structure like

lib/

app/

app/model/

app/view/

app/controller/

Or you structure it differently?

Answer 1

This seems like a very open ended question, as there is no “right” way to structure an application. Also, different size applications will gain different benefits from different structures. You may have only a few models, and not need any folders at all. You have need several. Anyway, on to my answer.

Since you are asking specifically about knockout, this assumes you are only taking about the client-side javascript, and not the code for your server. If you are talking about the entire application structure, please clarify this in your question.

First, Knockout does not have controllers. It has ViewModels. This may seem like a semantic distinction, but it really isn’t. Controllers are relatively dumb; they route actions from the view to business logic in the model. ViewModels, on the other hand, are smart; they contain the business logic AND the public properties and methods that the view will consume.

Models are usually not part of the Knockout side of things. They will be on your server, and represent your database tables (this is a generalization, obviously exceptions exist). With both of these, we eliminate the controller and model directories, and are left with a viewmodels directory.

Views are trickier. Views are your HTML, but they can also be your knockout templates if you want to reuse them. To keep a seperation between your “views” and your “templates”, I would call this directory templates.

Finally, I would not place any of this in a lib directory. Your application is not a library for itself. It is the application. All of this should be under your public javascript folder (since the web needs access to it), but I don’t see any reason to push it further down the tree. Surely you will need a lib directory for other plugins, but it will be used by your Knockout application, so lib should be at the same level as your app.