Question

In one of the example i picked from SO answers here and many BackBoneJs examples i see that the initialize function knows which view the model is going to be rendered with. I don’t know i am kind of biased now, is this a good practice or it depends on type of application being developed.

Example

http://jsfiddle.net/thomas/Yqk5A/

Edited Fiddle

http://jsfiddle.net/Yqk5A/187/

Code Reference

FriendList = Backbone.Collection.extend({
    initialize: function(){
        this.bind("add", function( model ){
            alert("hey");
            view.render( model );
        })
    }
});

Is the above a good practice or below

var friendslist = new FriendList;
var view = new FriendView({el: 'body'});
friendslist.bind("add", function( model ){
            alert("hey" + model.get("name"));
            view.render( model );
        })

in the edited fiddle collection is rendered by a view, and we also can use many more views to render the collection.

Answer 1

I don’t think the collection should know about the view that is used to render it. I know in my projects, the same collection is render in multiple ways so that approach would deteriorate rapidly.

In general I pass the collection to the view that renders the collection and the view will listen to add/remove/update events of the collection to render the elements. The collection view will have knowledge of the child view.

Check out the following link (3rd blog in a series) and in particular the UpdatingCollectionView. This is the approach that I’ve found useful.

http://liquidmedia.ca/blog/2011/02/backbone-js-part-3/