When router usage and when inner views, especially in Backbone/Require apps

Question

Should Backbone routers be used for nested views also, as it it is used for navigating in between more complete page views and some other sorts? When to use a router and when to use inner views?

For example a home view page has tabs and each tab for showing another view with its model and collection. This home view is similar to Twitter or Facebook. How should this complete page be rendered:

1. By navigating via router to subviews on tab clicks and rendering by subviews render function and placing them in home view page by homeview render, or routers is not and not good for this purpose. Advantage: a.bookmark-able subviews, b. ?more maintainable code. Disadvantage: on page refresh homeview part not rendered, only subview does.
2. Instead, on tab clicks subviews should be created in homeview and rendered in themselves and placed in the home view page by homeview render(). Advantage: no disadvantage above. Disadvantage: no advantage a, ?b above.

UPDATE:

3. A hybrid solution to refresh problem in 1. To have each subview to render homeview parts, tabs etc., by depending on a seperte single little template for that or from their templates having written those parts code to have those homeview parts. Disadvantage here is like separation of modules decreases a bit by subviews requiring (as dependancy) or including (in their template) something that is not sub at all but something like sup, main, belongs to an upper level module.

Or is there another, better, way?

Answer 1

Ultimately it's subjective; there is no rule for when you should start a new page View triggered by a Backbone.Router route and when you should just re-render a sub-view for a part of the DOM without involving a route. Really, it's just a matter of whether you want the user to feel like they've gone to a new page or not. Ask yourself:

• do you want them to be able to click back/forward in their browser?
• do you want them to be able to bookmark the "page"?
• is most of the DOM changing or just a small part?

To put it another way, when a user goes to a Backbone.Router page it indicates that a significant change in state has occurred on your site. Really all the bookmarking/history entry/significant DOM changes are just reflections of that. So if you feel that a significant change, whatever that means to you and your site, is happening, make a route for it. Otherwise just re-render a View.