Backbone/jQuery mobile duplicate view

Question

I've got some problems with my Backbone, RequireJS & jQuery mobile application. When I use a form view 2 times the form submit event is fired twice. Each new view is added to the body and the previous view will be removed. For that I use this code in my app.js file:

$(document).on("mobileinit", function () {
    $.mobile.linkBindingEnabled = false;
    $.mobile.hashListeningEnabled = false;

    $(document).on('pagehide', 'div[data-role="page"]', function (event, ui) {
        $(event.currentTarget).remove();
    });
})

Router.js

define([
  'jquery',
  'backbone',
  'views/projects/ProjectsView',
  'views/projects/AddProjectView'
], function($, Backbone, ProjectsView, AddProjectView) {

  return Backbone.Router.extend({

    routes: {
      'addProject': 'addProject',
      'editProject/:projectId': 'editProject', 
      '*actions': 'showProjects' // Default
    },

    addProject: function() {
      new AddProjectView().render();
    },
    editProject: function(projectId) {
      require([
        "views/projects/EditProjectView", 
        "collections/ProjectsCollection", 
        "models/ProjectModel"
      ], function (EditProjectView, ProjectsCollection, ProjectModel) {
        var projectsCollection = new ProjectsCollection();
        projectsCollection.fetch();

        var project = projectsCollection.get(projectId);
        if (project) {
          var view = new EditProjectView({model: project, projectsCollection: projectsCollection});
          view.render();
        }
      });
    },


    showProjects: function() {
      new ProjectsView().navigate();      
    }

  });
});

I've uploaded my code to a directory on my website: http://rickdoorakkers.nl/np2 If you go through the following steps, you'll see the problem:

1. Add a project
2. Add a second project with a different name
3. Open a project by clicking on it and change the values and save it
4. As you can see the event of adding a project is launched and there's a project added instead of changed.
5. This same problem also occurs when you try to change 2 projects after each other. The first project is edited then.

Is there somebody who can tell me what I'm doing wrong?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Rido, your code is really hard to read for me because of the way it's mixing together a few things and not following any of the usual conventions for Backbone.

For your specific problem, I have a feeling the problem is that you binding both the Edit view and the New view to body (el: body), both respond to the event submit, and you are never clearly cleaning up the views, so I think that whenever you add a project and then edit it, the add view is still in memory, still bound to the submit event and still answering the call = new project with the new name, instead of editing.

It's 'easy' to fix in a dirty way, by adding a call to stopListening after adding, but the real problem is that you are binding to body, and mixing togethers the Backbone Router and manual hash control + other weird patterns, such as fetching the collection every 5 lines (you could just create one at the start of the App and always use it! here it's localstorage so it doesn't matter but if you ever move to a remote storage, you'll regret it... fetch() reset the collection and do a full reload!). May I suggest you maybe try to rewrite this without caring about jQuery mobile and just try to make it work with Backbone.Router + a single collection + not binding to body but instead, create the views on the fly and append them to body / remove when you are done? You'll see the bugs will be less weird and easier to track.