Question

I need to represent a complex model in MVC (model view collection) architecture. I’m using backbone.js with jsTree.

I’m retrieving data from the server as JSON and making a tree with it. For displaying the tree I’m using jQuery’s jsTree plugin. The data represents file system architecture of some remote system.

The problems I’m encountering are these:

1. Should I create two models? One representing directory and one representing file because there can be more files inside the directory.
2. How can I attach the view with the UI? I want to listen to all the events and do some server side action depending upon them because the view is being dynamically made by the jsTree plugin.
3. If I make 2 models do I need to make 2 collections? Would a singe one would do because ids in the full set of all the models will be unique?

Thanks

Answer 1

Directory and file really represent the composite design pattern. You could have two models (File and Directory) but then use polymorphism to do something like this.getContents().

I don’t have much experience with backbone, so can’t advise on point 2 or 3. (I suggest that you split these into other questions.)