How to render and append sub-views in Backbone.js

Question

I have a nested-View setup which can get somewhat deep in my application. There are a bunch of ways I could think of initializing, rendering and appending the sub-views, but I'm wondering what common practice is.

Here are a couple I've thought of:

initialize : function () {

    this.subView1 = new Subview({options});
    this.subView2 = new Subview({options});
},

render : function () {

    this.$el.html(this.template());

    this.subView1.setElement('.some-el').render();
    this.subView2.setElement('.some-el').render();
}

Pros: You don't have to worry about maintaining the right DOM order with appending. The views are initialized early on, so there isn't as much to do all at once in the render function.

Cons: You are forced to re-delegateEvents(), which might be costly? The parent view's render function is cluttered with all of the subview rendering that needs to happen? You don't have the ability to set the tagName of the elements, so the template needs to maintain the correct tagNames.

Another way:

initialize : function () {

},

render : function () {

    this.$el.empty();

    this.subView1 = new Subview({options});
    this.subView2 = new Subview({options});

    this.$el.append(this.subView1.render().el, this.subView2.render().el);
}

Pros: You don't have to re-delegate events. You don't need a template that just contains empty placeholders and your tagName's are back to being defined by the view.

Cons: You now have to make sure to append things in the right order. The parent view's render is still cluttered by the subview rendering.

With an onRender event:

initialize : function () {
    this.on('render', this.onRender);
    this.subView1 = new Subview({options});
    this.subView2 = new Subview({options});
},

render : function () {

    this.$el.html(this.template);

    //other stuff

    return this.trigger('render');
},

onRender : function () {

    this.subView1.setElement('.some-el').render();
    this.subView2.setElement('.some-el').render();
}

Pros: The subview logic is now separated from the view's render() method.

With an onRender event:

initialize : function () {
    this.on('render', this.onRender);
},

render : function () {

    this.$el.html(this.template);

    //other stuff

    return this.trigger('render');
},

onRender : function () {
    this.subView1 = new Subview();
    this.subView2 = new Subview();
    this.subView1.setElement('.some-el').render();
    this.subView2.setElement('.some-el').render();
}

I've kind of mix and matched a bunch of different practices across all of these examples (so sorry about that) but what are the ones that you would keep or add? and what would you not do?

Summary of practices:

Instantiate subviews in initialize or in render?
Perform all sub-view rendering logic in render or in onRender?
Use setElement or append/appendTo?

I would be careful about the new without delete, you got memory leak in there. — vimdude
Don't worry, I have a close method and an onClose that cleans up children, but I'm just curious about how to instantiate and render them in the first place. — Ian Storm Taylor
@abdelsaid: In JavaScript, the GC handles deallocation of memory. delete in JS is not the same as the delete from C++. It's a very poorly named keyword if you ask me. — Mike Bailey
@MikeBantegui got it but it's the same as in java except that in JS to free memory you just need to assign null. To clarify what I mean, try this create a loop with a new object inside and monitor the memory. Of course GC will get to it but you will loose memory before it gets to it. In this case Render which might get called many times. — vimdude
I'm a novice Backbone developer. Can anybody please explain why does example 1 forces us to re-delegate events? (Or should I ask this in it's own question?) Thanks. — pilau

Lukas Lukas · Accepted Answer · 2012-06-22T16:20:48

I have generally seen/used a couple of different solutions:

Solution 1

var OuterView = Backbone.View.extend({
    initialize: function() {
        this.inner = new InnerView();
    },

    render: function() {
        this.$el.html(template); // or this.$el.empty() if you have no template
        this.$el.append(this.inner.$el);
        this.inner.render();
    }
});

var InnerView = Backbone.View.extend({
    render: function() {
        this.$el.html(template);
        this.delegateEvents();
    }
});

This is similar to your first example, with a few changes:

The order in which you append the sub elements matters
The outer view does not contain the html elements to be set on the inner view(s) (meaning you can still specify tagName in the inner view)
render() is called AFTER the inner view's element has been placed into the DOM, which is helpful if your inner view's render() method is placing/sizing itself on the page based on other elements' position/size (which is a common use case, in my experience)

Solution 2

var OuterView = Backbone.View.extend({
    initialize: function() {
        this.render();
    },

    render: function() {
        this.$el.html(template); // or this.$el.empty() if you have no template
        this.inner = new InnerView();
        this.$el.append(this.inner.$el);
    }
});

var InnerView = Backbone.View.extend({
    initialize: function() {
        this.render();
    },

    render: function() {
        this.$el.html(template);
    }
});

Solution 2 may look cleaner, but it has caused some strange things in my experience and has affected performance negatively.

I generally use Solution 1, for a couple of reasons:

A lot of my views rely on already being in the DOM in their render() method
When the outer view is re-rendered, views don't have to be re-initialized, which re-initialization can cause memory leaks and also cause freaky issues with existing bindings

Keep in mind that if you are initializing a new View() every time render() is called, that initialization is going to call delegateEvents() anyway. So that shouldn't necessarily be a "con", as you've expressed.

How to render and append sub-views in Backbone.js

10 Answers