I've been learning backbone.js over the past couple of weeks and am about to start using it in anger in an app I'm writing. My question to you is about a use case for models and collections in a Bootstrap 3 navbar.
On my server side I authenticate the user and, based on their profile, assign them a role (author, editor, administrator etc.). I then construct an object that contains the appropriate menu structure for the user's role and pass that to the client using Handlebars. The intent is for the browser to construct the HTML to render the menus according to the properties (key/values) in the object using backbone.
My thoughts are that the navbar itself is a collection of models (navbar); each dropdown menu or link on the navbar is a single model (navbarItem); each of these contains a collection of menu items (navbarItemMembers), these collections being of models of each individual menu item (navbarItemMember). I can then set event listeners against each navbarItemMember to trigger an appropriate route or render action as appropriate.
So, getting to the point... am I over-complicating things? A collection containing models each containing a collection of other models, each of those mapping to a view that renders a on the main page. Seems convoluted to me, but from my (albeit limited) understanding of backbone.js it does seem the right way to do this...?
Advice much appreciated from those more experienced (battle scarred?!) than I. Thank you.
Use a collection when it's going to provide some benefit to you over a plain model. The benefits could be either
Views for each item in the list rather than a having a single View that iterates over the list.I don't think a basic navbar benefits from either of those. If your navbar has some super fancy elements beyond just links then maybe #2 applies but otherwise keep it simple, use a single model with a single view/template