Backbone.Marionette CollectionView/CompositeView r

Question

This question is an extension of this Related question.

Taking Derick's advice, I now have my data in the correct shape. i.e. I have a collection of Department objects, each of which have a collection of Users.

Again following Derick's advice I'm trying to render a CollectionView of CompositeView's

My collection view looks like this

class UserListView extends Backbone.Marionette.CollectionView
    itemView: UserCompositeView
    id: "user-list"  

    appendHtml: (collectionView, itemView, index) =>
      itemModel = @collection.at(index)
      itemView = new UserCompositeView
        model: itemModel 
        collection: itemModel.get("users")

      collectionView.$el.append itemView.el

and my Composite View looks like this:

  class UserCompositeView extends Backbone.Marionette.CompositeView
    itemView: UserItemView
    itemViewContainer: '#users'

If I don't override the appendHtml method then the view renders but it only renders the properties of the Department model. It doesn't render the users collection.

When I override the appendHtml method in the CollectionView so I can pass a model (a Department object) and a collection of users but one or both of them seem to be the wrong type of objects because the Marionette bindTo function is complaining that the object has no 'on' method.

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

What does itemModel.get("users") return?

If this is returning a JavaScript array or object literal, that would be the problem. You have to pass a valid Backbone.Collection as the collection parameter, not just an array of objects.

collection: new Backbone.Collection(itemModel.get("users"))

Answer 2

You can also look into using backbone-relational which will let you define models that have submodels or subcollections.