How can I "bubble up" events in a Backbone View hierarchy?

Question

I have a backbone app with a view structure that looks like the following - note that I've removed implementations, models, collections, etc. for brevity:

NewsListView = Backbone.View.extend({

    el: $('li#newspane'),

    // This is what I would like to be able to do
    // events: { 'filtered': 'reset' }

    initialize: function() {
        _.bindAll(this);
    },

    render: function() {
    },

    reset: function(){
    }

});

FilterView = Backbone.View.extend({

    el: $('li.filter'),

    initialize: function() {
    },

    render: function() {
    },

    toggleFilter: function() {
    }

});

AllView = Backbone.View.extend({

    initialize: function() {

        this.newsListView = new NewsListView();
        this.filterView = new FilterView();

    }

});

Essentially, whenever the FilterView's toggleFilter() function is called, I would like to fire off an event called filtered or something like that that is then caught by the NewsListView, which then calls its reset() function. Without passing a reference of a NewsListView object to my FilterView, I'm not sure how to send it an event. Any ideas?

Answer 1

You're on the right track. It sounds like what you need is a global event dispatcher. There a decent article and example here: http://www.michikono.com/2012/01/11/adding-a-centralized-event-dispatcher-on-backbone-js/