Spine.js get associated controller from element

Question

I got an html-element aside.sidebar with an associated spine.js controller.

class App.Sidebar extends Spine.Controller
  tag: 'aside'
  className: 'sidebar'

how do i get the controller from the element? something like this:

con = $("aside.sidebar").spineController().someControllerMethod()

I'm using jquery + spine.js.

Answer 1

I've looked through the controller source code and it doesn't look like there is a built-in way to access the controller from the element (https://github.com/spine/spine/blob/dev/src/spine.coffee#L482). What I do is make a global variable to hold the controller so that I can access it from other places:

app = new App()

# inside of App constructor:
@foo_widget = new App.FooWidgetController()

# from other non-spine code:
app.foo_widget.method()

Another option would be to do the association yourself using jquery's data() method:

class App.FooWidgetController
  constructor: ->
    super
    @el.data 'controller', this

# from other code:
$('#widget').data('controller').method()