Extra divs in itemviews and layouts in Backbone.Ma

Question

I am trying out Backbone.Marionette and I am confused as to why my Layouts and ItemViews keep generating extra divs.

example is in Coffee btw.

AppLayout = Backbone.Marionette.Layout.extend
  template: "#my-layout",

  regions:
    menu: "#menu",
    content: "#content"

MyMenuView = Backbone.Marionette.ItemView.extend
  template: '#project_wiz_nav_template'

MyContentView = Backbone.Marionette.ItemView.extend
  template: '#project_setup_template'

MyApp = new Backbone.Marionette.Application()

MyApp.addRegions
  mainRegion: '#project'

MyApp.addInitializer ->
  layout = new AppLayout()
  MyApp.mainRegion.show(layout)

  layout.menu.show(new MyMenuView())
  layout.content.show(new MyContentView())

MyApp.start()

This is what index.html contains:

<div id='project'></div>
<script type='text/template' id='project_wiz_nav_template'> <h2>HI</h2> </script>
<script type='text/template' id='project_setup_template'> <h2>WORLD</h2> </script>
<script id="my-layout" type="text/template">
  <h2>Hello!</h2>
  <div id="menu"></div>
  <div id="content"></div>
</script>

This is what it produces:

<div id="project">
  <div>
    <h2>Hello!</h2>
    <div id="menu">
      <div> 
        <h2>HI</h2> 
      </div>
    </div>
    <div id="content">
      <div> 
        <h2>WORLD</h2> 
      </div>
    </div>
  </div>
</div>

As you can see, it keeps generating extra divs for the views and the layouts. I've tried adding el: '#menu' and el: '#content' to no avail.

Answer 1

This is not because of Marionette. Backbone generates a <div> class for you by default. You can set the tag via the tagName attribute. See comments on the question for duplicates of this.

Answer 2

A hacky workaround, but jQuery's closest() actually did the job for me. Rather than using the returned myView.el directly, I'm using $(myView.el).closest("div").html() -- as I said, hacky, but as a short-term fix it's working.
I was tinkering with this tutorial: http://davidsulc.com/blog/2013/02/03/tutorial-nested-views-using-backbone-marionettes-compositeview/comment-page-1/#comment-3801, which takes a nested model and creates an accordion view using Bootstrap. I wanted to do the same with his starting point, only using the jQueryUI accordion widget, which is the reason I needed an unwrapped view coming back -- hence the filtering with closest().
Other than adding the jqueryUI links and changing the returned HTML as delineated above, it's working pretty well: http://dartsleague.parentleafarm.com/superheroes/

Answer 3

Specify your el property. I think that will fix it:

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