Question

I’m trying to use the render function in questionListView, and it appears to be running, but is not updating the page.

The template:

<script id="myTemplate" type="text/template">
 <p>Test</p>
</script>

Part of the JS:

$(function(){

//Test data
var initialListData = [
    { listName: "Sample Questions", listID: 1},
    { listName: "Default questions", listID: 2}
];

// MODELS ----------------------------------------------------
var questionList = Backbone.Model.extend({
    defaults: {
        listName: "Name of the list",
        listID: 0
    }
});

// COLLECTIONS ----------------------------------------------------
var populateList = Backbone.Collection.extend({
    model: questionList
});

// VIEWS ----------------------------------------------------
var questionListView = Backbone.View.extend({
    template: $("#myTemplate").html(),
    render: function () {
        console.log('I can see this, but nothing happens...');
        var tmpl = _.template(this.template);            
        $(this.el).append(tmpl(this.model.toJSON()));
        return this;
    }
});


var AppView = Backbone.View.extend({
  el : $("#content"),
    initialize: function (){
        this.collection=new populateList(initialListData);
        this.render();
    },
    render: function (){
        _.each(this.collection.models, function (item) {
            this.renderSelect(item);
        }, this);
    },
    renderSelect: function(item){
         var populateQuestionList = new questionListView({
             model: item
        });
        this.$el.append(populateQuestionList.render().el);
    }
});

var app = new AppView();

} (jQuery));

Thanks!

Answer 1

Are you triggering this in a callback to the document.ready event? If not, your code could be executing before the DOM is actually loaded and ready. Try:

$(function () {
    var app = new AppView();
});

A few misc points.

• You can do template: _.template($("#myTemplate").html()) to cache the template function as a micro-optimization
• You can use this.$el instead of $(this.el) in recent version of backbone. You are already doing this in one place but not both.