How to close all open durandaljs modal dialogs

Question

Currently I am working on a project that relies heavily on modal dialogs. I'm using durandal's dialog plugin. The problem I have is that within a modal, a user can click an element which displays its details in another modal.

What I would like to do is to close all open modals before I open a new modal. Can anyone give me a good idea of how I can ensure only a single dialog is open at any given time in durandaljs?

Answer 1

Why not use Durandal's pub/sub, or a client-side message bus such as postal.js (which is what we use)? We close all modals by sending a close message over the channel 'app' and the topic 'app/modals'. Instead of holding a reference to an observable (which could have memory implications), we just hold a reference to the message channel (which is a string). Much cleaner way to go.

Answer 2

Ok so the issue I was facing was that I have various Modals, where one modal could be opened from within another modal. However I wanted the modals to close when another would open. The tricky part was that I am using widgets and click events to open the modals.

Since my project is an SPA it occurred to me to simply create a ko.observable - currentModal - on my global object and each new Modal closes the previous, then replaces the old with the new in currentModal(this);

I went even further and am now using the route objects to fire the Modals open as well. Durandal is fun.