Too much instance of Backbone.View and Backbone.Model

Question

I have a main view which is responsible to render other views…. Here's the full code (1) (2) (3).

When I load for the first time the views (View1, View2, View3), everything is ok.
Then, if I try to reload the view changing this.options apparently it seems ok..
But I noticed that there are some zombie views…,
I mean instance of previous Views in memory.
I discover this using this peace of code…

View1 = Backbone.View.extend({
    initialize: function ()
    {
        this.model.on('change', function () {
            console.log(this.cid);
        }, this); 
    }
});

Looking to the cid I discovered that every time I re-load the view new view with different cid are generated and stay in memory.. Examaple

** first load **:
console.log(this.cid); // cid:12

** Second load **
console.log(this.cid); // cid:12
console.log(this.cid); // cid:13

And so on...

What is wrong with my design? how can I fix it?

---

(1) the entry point

require([
    "js/mainApp"
    ], function(App){
        App.initialize(data.id);
});

---

(2) the mainApp

define([
    "js/views/taskDetailView"
], function (TaskDetailView) {

    var initialize = function(task_id){

        var vent;

        vent = _.extend({}, Backbone.Events); // The Event Aggregator

        var taskDetailView = new TaskDetailView({
            task_id: task_id,
            vent: vent
        });

        $(".project-content").html(taskDetailView.$el);
    }

    return { 
        initialize: initialize
    };
});

---

(3)

define([
    "js/views/view1",
    "js/views/view2",
    "js/views/view3",
    "text!templates/Task/TaskDetailedView.html"
], function (View1, View2, View3, taskDetailedViewTemplate) {

    var TaskDetailView = Backbone.View.extend({

        el: $(".project-content"),

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

        render: function ()
        {
            var options;
            // render from template and assign this.el to the root of the element
            // e.g .project-content
            this.setElement($(Mustache.render(taskDetailedViewTemplate)));
            this.view1 = new View1(_.extend( {el:this.$("#taskView")} , this.options));
            this.view2 = new View2(_.extend( {el:this.$("#feedView")} , this.options));
            this.view3 = new View3(_.extend( {el:this.$("#followerView")} , this.options));
        }
    });    

    return TaskDetailView;
});

Answer 1

Are you forgetting to actually remove the views from the DOM

http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/#View-remove

Just assigning another view to the same element won't remove the previous view (more then one view can reference the same element).

Edit:

You might want to try checking if the views exist before reassigning them

    render: function ()
    {
        var options;
        // render from template and assign this.el to the root of the element
        // e.g .project-content

     if (this.view1 != null) {
       this.view1.remove();
      }

     //the rest of your code

Edit2:

I don't know how your mainApp gets called for the second time, but perhaps you might want to try having it keep a refference to the TaskDetailsView

One way to try is before assigning a new TaskDetailsView clean up the existing one

 if (this._taskDetailsView != null) { 
     this._taskDetailsView.cleanUp().remove(); 
    }

 var taskDetailView = new TaskDetailView({
            task_id: task_id,
            vent: vent
  });
    this._taskDetailsView = taskDetailView;

A better way would probably involve just refreshing the necessary parts of the view

define([
    "js/views/taskDetailView"
], function (TaskDetailView) {

    var _taskDetailView;
    var initialize = function(task_id){

        var vent;

        vent = _.extend({}, Backbone.Events); // The Event Aggregator

        if (this._taskDetailsView == null) { 
        var taskDetailView = new TaskDetailView({
            task_id: task_id,
            vent: vent
        });
          this._taskDetailsView = taskDetailView;
        } else {
            this._taskDetailsView.refresh({task_id: task_id,
              vent: vent
           });

          }
        $(".project-content").html(taskDetailView.$el);
    }

    return { 
        initialize: initialize
    };
});