Question

I’m working within a Javascript + BackboneJS (an MVC framework) + RequireJS framework, but this question is somewhat OO generic.

Let me start by explaining that in Backbone, your Views are a mix of traditional Views and Controllers, and your HTML Templates are the traditional MVC Views

Been racking my head about this for a while and I’m not sure what the right/pragmatic approach should be.

I have a User object that contains user preferences (like unit system, language selection, anything else) that a lot of code depends on.

Some of my Views do most of the work without the use of templates (by using 3rd party libs, like Mapping and Graphing libs), and as such they have a dependency on the User object to take care of unit conversion, for example. I’m currently using RequireJS to manage that dependency without breaking encapsulation too much.

Some of my Views do very little work themselves, and only pass on Model data to my templating engine / templates, which do the work and DO have a dependency on the User object, again, for things like units conversion. The only way to pass this dependency into the template is by injecting it into the Model, and passing the model into the template engine.

My question is, how to best handle such a widely needed dependency?
– Create an App-wide reference/global object that is accessible everywhere? (YUK)
– Use RequireJS managed dependencies, even though it’s generally only recommended to use managed dependency loading for class/object definitions rather than concrete objects.
– Or, only ever use dependency injection, and manually pass that dependency into everything that needs it?

Answer 1

From a purely technical point of view, I would argue that commutable globals (globals that may change), especially in javascript, are dangerous and wrong. Especially since javascript is full of parts of code that get executed asynchronously. Consider the following code:

window.loggedinuser = Users.get("Paul");
addSomeStuffToLoggedinUser();
window.loggedinuser = Users.get("Sam");
doSomeOtherStuffToLoggedinUser();

Now if addSomeStuffToLoggedinUser() executes asynchronously somewhere (e.g. it does an ajax call, and then another ajax call when the first one finishes), it may very well be adding stuff to the new loggedinuser (“Sam”), by the time it gets to the second ajax call. Clearly not what you want.

Having said that, I’m even less of a supporter of having some user object that we hand around all the time from function to function, ad infinitum.

Personally, having to choose between these two evils, I would choose a global scope for things that “very rarely change” — unless perhaps I was building a nuclear powerstation or something. So, I tend to make the logged in user available globally in my app, taking the risk that if somehow for some reason some call runs very late, and I have a situation where one user logs out and directly the other one logs in, something strange may happen. (then again, if a meteor crashes into the datacenter that hosts my app, something strange may happen as well… I’m not protecting against that either). Actually a possible solution would be to reload the whole app as soon as someone logs out.

So, I guess it all depends on your app. One thing that makes it better (and makes you feel like you’re still getting some OO karma points) is to hide your data in some namespaced singleton:

var myuser = MyApp.domain.LoggedinDomain.getLoggedinUser();
doSomethingCoolWith(myuser);

in stead of

doSomethingCoolWith(window.loggedinuser);

although it’s pretty much the same thing in the end…