Backbone And Best Practice Getting Config Json

I've got a JSON file that looks like this. { 'config': { 'setting1': 'blabla', 'setting2': 'blablabla' }, 'content': { 'title': 'Title of an

Solution 1:

I think what you've done works fine and is correct. But you may need to refactor a little bit since "it will be developed with many other Views based on 'config'".

IMHO, the first thing you need to do is to handle failure in your getJson callback to make the process more robust.

Second, it is useful to create a Factory to generate your views because your logic is to generate different views based on the config data from server. So the factory maybe:

contentViewFactory.generate = function(data) {
    var config = data.config;
    ....
    varActualContentView = SomeContentView;
    var contentModel = newContentModel(data.content);
    return = newActualContentView({ model: contentModel });
}

If your logic is simple, you can have a dict map from config to view class like:

var viewMaps = {
    "exercise" : ExerciseView,
    "other": SomeOtherView,
    //....
}

And if every workflow has a AnswersView you can keep that in your getJSON callback. So maybe now your getJSON looks like this:

$.getJSON(source, function(data) {
    // keep the config->view logic in the factoryvar contentView = contentViewFactory.generate(data);

    var answerCollection = newAnswersCollection();
    _.each(data.answers, function(answer) {
        answerCollection.add(answer);
    });

    var answersView = newAnswersView({collection: answerCollection});

    $(destination).html( contentView.render().el );
    $('.answers').append( answersView.el );
})
.fail(){
    //some failure handling
};

Furthermore, if you have common logics in you "ContentView"s, it's natural that you can have a "BaseContentView" or "ContentViewMixin" to extract the common logic and use extends to make your code more OO:

Backbone.View.extend(_.extend({}, ContentViewMixin, {
    //.....
}

So if someone is trying to add a new ContentView, he/she just needs to add some code in the factory to make the new View be generated by config. Then extends the ContentViewMixin to implement the new View.