backbone.js view doesn't display results because of asynchronous fetch , doesn't render

Question

I've noticed that my view's render function is being called 2 times. Here's my code:

the View, which get's a collection:

define([
  'jquery',
  'underscore',
  'backbone',
  'mustache',
  'icanhaz',
  'views/spots/Spot',
  'collections/Spots',
  'text!../../../../templates/spots/spots.mustache!strip',
], function($,
            _,
            Backbone,
            mustache,
            ich,
            SpotView,
            Spots,
            SpotsTemplate){
  var SpotsView = Backbone.View.extend({

    initialize: function(){
       var ich = window['ich'],
          spots = ich.addTemplate('spots',SpotsTemplate);

          spots = ich['spots'];

          this.template = spots;

      _.bindAll(this,'render'); 
      var self = this;
      this.collection.bind("all", function() { self.render(); }, this);
      this.collection.fetch(); 
    },
    events: {
        "change": "render"
    },
    render: function(){
      window.counter = window.counter +1;
      console.log('inside render for the ' + window.counter + ' times!');

      this.el = this.template();

      this.collection.each(function (spot) {

        $(this.el).append(new SpotView({model:spot}).render().el);
      }, this);

      console.log($(this.el).children().length);

      return this;
    }
  });
  // Returning instantiated views can be quite useful for having "state"
  return SpotsView;
});

the code inside app.js , when i try to display

   var  spots = new Spots({model: Spot});

    window.counter = 0 + 0;

    var spots_view = new SpotsView({collection: spots});
    $('#spots').html(spots_view.render().el);

My output is:

inside render for the 1 times! 
1 
inside render for the 2 times! 
6 

while playing with different things ive noticed it is being called 3 times even. What am i doing wrong? obviously by the time the results are brought from the server to the render function this line:

$('#spots').html(spots_view.render().el);

has already passed

thanks a lot

Answer 1

Your view's initialize says this:

this.collection.bind("all", function() { self.render(); }, this);
this.collection.fetch();

and fetch will reset the collection:

When the model data returns from the server, the collection will reset.

Resetting the collection will:

[trigger] a single "reset" event at the end

By binding to "all", any event on the collection will trigger a render call. So your view will render once when you explicitly say spots_view.render() and again when the fetch call gets something back from the server.

As an aside, you have this:

_.bindAll(this,'render');

so you don't need to use self and self.render() or supply the context argument to bind, you could simply say this:

_.bindAll(this, 'render');
this.collection.bind("all", this.render);

You're also doing this in your render:

this.el = this.template();

and that's never a good idea. You should be using setElement if you need to change your view's this.el; that will take care of rebinding the events and updating this.$el. However, that won't help you if you've already put this.el into the DOM. Instead of replacing el entirely, you should put everything you need inside this.el:

var $content = $(this.template());
this.collection.each(function (spot) {
    var spot = new SpotView({ model: spot });
    $content.append(spot.render().el);
});
this.$el.html($content);

Then you can empty it and re-render it in response to events without any problems.