Question

Just starting to use backbone and have a quick question and thought I’d write a simple message board. I want to have something that responds to the hash change detail/:id and have added this to the router like this. This seems to work but I don’t think this is the proper way of doing this. Is this, in general, how a http call get an object would take place (specifically the success callback)?

var MessageBoardRouter = Backbone.Router.extend({
  routes: {
    "detail/:id" : "showDetail"//,
  },
  showDetail: function(id){
    console.log('within showDetail with ' + id);
    //var p1=new Post({header:'my original header'});
    var p2=new Post({id:id});
    p2.fetch({
     success: function(){   // <- should I be doing this or different way or is who strategy off???
     console.log(p2.attributes);
     var view= new MbDetail();
     view.render(p2);
    }
    });
 },

thx in advance

Answer 1

There are 2 ways to respond to backbone events: with a callback (like you have above) or with event bindings. I believe event bindings to be the more idiomatic and “backboney” approach for the general case for the following reasons:

• events allow multiple places in your code to react to the same event, whereas there can only be a single callback
• backbone is otherwise designed around events so this approach is consistent and “backboney”
• the callback style is really only necessary if you want to override the default event dispatch behavior
• I believe the callback style is inspired by jquery and not as consistent internally within backbone as events

However, with that in mind, both styles will work just fine. In your specific example, you might want to code it like this:

var p2=new Post({id:id});
p2.on('change', function(post){
 console.log(post.attributes);
 var view= new MbDetail();
 view.render(p2);
}
p2.fetch();

Some other ancillary points:

• you don’t necessarily need a new view instance for each fetch, you can create just one, pass the model to it’s constructor, and have it rerender itself on every fetch. This will help avoid memory leaks due to left over event bindings
• Don’t pass arguments to render(). It’s not designed to expect them. Pass the model to the view via the options.model constructor argument, then reference the model from within render as needed.