Intro

backbone.switcher role is to switch views when a certain attribute of the model has change. Views are created each time and are given the "parent" model as a reference. Hence, the Parent view keeps a reference to the functions as a somewhat "proxy" for the views.

The purpose of switcher is to overcome the boilerplate of managing views and zombie views when switching views. Also, it allows to create views which corresponds to a state in a model rather than to a url (think of angular's ui-router).

Requirements

switcher is an extension on top of backbone.beamer

Usage

simple usage of switcher:

    var layout = Backbone.View.extend({
        switcher: {
            // 'key' is a reference to an attribute in "this.model"
            // it tells the view to listen to change event of the "resource" attribute
            key: 'resource',

            // the keys "viewA", "viewB" are possible values
            // of the "resource" attribute in "this.model"
            // "SettingsView" is a reference to some custom Backbone.View object (not an instance)
            views: {
                settings: SettingsView,
                help: HelpView
            },

            // the default target element to render each view is "this.$el"
            // the target can be customized simply with a selector
            // the selector will be evaluated with "this.$"
            target: '.a-css-selector'
        },

        initialize: function() {
            console.log('init...', this.options);
        }
    });

    // later in the instance of layout
    var layoutView = new layout({ model: contactModel });
    contactModel.set({ resource: "settings" });
    // now layoutView will remove the current active view and
    // will instansiate a new viewA instance, and render it to layoutView.el DOM element.