Backbone.js : repopulate or recreate the view?

Question

In my web application, I have a user list in a table on the left, and a user detail pane on the right. When the admin clicks a user in the table, its details should be displ

Answer 1

One alternative is to bind, as opposed to creating a series of new views and then unbinding those views. You'd accomplish this doing something like:

window.User = Backbone.Model.extend({
});

window.MyViewModel = Backbone.Model.extend({
});

window.myView = Backbone.View.extend({
    initialize: function(){
        this.model.on('change', this.alert, this); 
    },
    alert: function(){
        alert("changed"); 
    }
}); 

You'd set the model of myView to myViewModel, which would be set to a User model. This way, if you set myViewModel to another user (i.e., changing its attributes) then it could trigger a render function in the view with the new attributes.

One problem is that this breaks the link to the original model. You could get around this by either using a collection object, or by setting the user model as an attribute of the viewmodel. Then, this would be accessible in the view as myview.model.get("model").