Backbonejs getting element that triggered route

Question

I'm using Backbonejs routing and trying to get the element that triggered a route, for example if I have:

<a href="#/files" id="link123">Click</a>, is there anyway inside of a route to know which element was clicked so I can get the id or class any arbitrary attribute of that element?

Thanks!

Doesn't that kind of defeat the point of routes? They're meant to be bookmarkable, which doesn't work if you make them dependent on a clicked element. Why not just use an ordinary click event? — McGarnagle
why don't you send information along with url like #/files/link123 — Dhiraj
It's a weird case, basically we scroll to certain points of the page based on history, so if your viewing a list of items, we scroll to your previous position on the page. In some cases, we don't want this behavior, so I need a way to know which links were clicked to not enable it. — dzm

Vincent Briglia Vincent Briglia · Accepted Answer · 2012-10-12T17:50:39

First off, from the official Backbone documentation:

http://backbonejs.org/#Router-extend

Note that you'll want to avoid using a leading slash in your route definitions

I would recommend following that pattern

Secondly to solve your problem, what you can do is in your view, bind to the 'click' event of your links as such:

events: {
    'click a': 'onClick'
}

where

onClick: function (event) {
    event.preventDefault();
    event.stopPropagation();
    var url = $(event.currentTarget).attr('href');
    // the following line depends on how you implemented your app, this is an example
    window.app.controller.navigate(url, {trigger: true});
}

what this does now, is that you've intercepted in your view, the element that you use to trigger the onClick method.

If you would provide a bit more information as to what exactly you're trying to achieve, perhaps I can elaborate my answer more.

Backbonejs getting element that triggered route

1 Answers