Handling Subsidiary Views in Backbone.js - backbone.js

Question

I have a basic Backbone application which obtain an array of JSON objects from a remote service and displays them: all good so far. However, each JSON object has an array of tags and I want to display the tags in a separate area of the webpage.
My question is: what is the most Backbone-friendly way of doing this? I could parse the existing data again in a second view, which is cleaner but takes up more computation (processing the entire array twice).
An alternative is gathering up the tag information in the primary view as it is working through the array and then passing it along to the subsidiary view, but then I'm linking the views together.
Finally, I'd like to filter based on those tags (so the tags will become toggle buttons and turning those buttons on/off will filter the information in the primary view); does this make any difference to how this should be laid out?
Bonus points for code snippets.

Answer 1

Hm. I'm not sure if this is the Backbone-friendly way, but I'll put the logic to retrieve a list of tags (I think that's what you meant by "parse") in the collection.
Both the main view and the subview will "listen" to the same collection, and the subview will just call collection.getTags() to get a list of tags it needs.
// Model that represents the list data
var ListDataModel = Backbone.Model.extend({
defaults: function() {
return {
name: null,
tags: []
};
}
});
// Collection of list data
var ListDataCollection = Backbone.Collection.extend({
model: ListDataModel,
initialize: function() {
var me = this;
// Expires tag collection on reset/change
this.on('reset', this.expireTagCache, this);
this.on('change', this.expireTagCache, this);
},
/**
* Expires tag cache
* #private
*/
expireTagCache: function() {
this._cachedTags = null;
},
/**
* Retrieves an array of tags in collection
*
* #return {Array}
*/
getTags: function() {
if (this._cachedTags === null) {
this._cachedTags = _.union.apply(this, this.pluck('tags'));
}
return this._cachedTags;
},
sync: function(method, model, options) {
if (method === 'read') {
var me = this;
// Make an XHR request to get data for this demo
Backbone.ajax({
url: '/echo/json/',
method: 'POST',
data: {
// Feed mock data into JSFiddle's mock XHR response
json: JSON.stringify([
{ id: 1, name: 'one', tags: [ 'number', 'first', 'odd' ] },
{ id: 2, name: 'two', tags: [ 'number', 'even' ] },
{ id: 3, name: 'a', tags: [ 'alphabet', 'first' ] }
]),
},
success: function(resp) {
options.success(me, resp, options);
},
error: function() {
if (options.error) {
options.error();
}
}
});
}
else {
// Call the default sync method for other sync method
Backbone.Collection.prototype.sync.apply(this, arguments);
}
}
});
var listColl = new ListDataCollection();
listColl.fetch({
success: function() {
console.log(listColl.getTags());
}
});
I guess two reasons for handling this in the collection:
It keeps the View code cleaner (This is given that we are not doing very complex logic in the tag extraction - It's just a simple _.pluck() and _.union().
It has 0 business logic involved - It can arguably belong to the data layer.
To address the performance issue:
It does go through the collection twice - However, if the amont of data you are consuming is too much for the client to process even in this case, you may want to consider asking the Backend to provide an API endpoint for this. (Even 500 pieces of data with a total of 1000 tags shouldn't bee too much for a somewhat modern browser to handle nowadays.)
Hmm. Does this help?
JSFiddle to go with this with the collection and the model: http://jsfiddle.net/dashk/G8LaB/ (And, a log statement to demonstrate the result of .getTags()).