Question

I have up to 63 elements that get updated when one changes, do I need a View for each one?
What is the correct way to handle this?
I have a tree structure in my html, where nodes are related to other nodes at different levels.
I wrote js code to handle checking and updating, but that was pre-backbone. I can write the code, I just don’t know if I need a different view for each element and what the best practice is.

Answer 1

Each view in Backbone is an abstraction of an visual interface unit, backed by business data(model/collection). Wrapping each responsive element as a view is possible, but rarely the best decision, for that generally means the granularity of abstraction is too fine, which may cause the degradation of efficiency and maintainability.

To effectively benefit from Backbone, designer should think in a big picture first. Many people tend to design/write static HTML code first, then inject dynamic JavaScript later. I don’t think that’s a good approach. It’s better to partition your complex system into several relatively simple and well-defined modules, wrapping visual parts into views and business data parts into models/collections. As for DOM elements, they are just (views’) implementation details and will naturally follow the definition of views.

To sum up, rather than decide how to map pre-existing DOM elements with views, decide how to implement pre-designed views with DOM elements.