need feedback on recursive tree structure / CompositeView about backbone.marionette

[mxriverlynn]

So, having sat on this all day and thinking about it in the back of my head, I'm slowly coming to the conclusion that what I have is good enough. The amount of code that it would take to move this to the next step of having it be a self-contained hierarchy that knows how to handle the top level item whether or not a model exists, is going to push me in to diminishing returns and probably not be worth the headache that it would cause in terms of maintenance.

[bennage]

I've looked over your sample, I don't have a better suggestion (though I am still a little backbone baby).

I had a similar problem though in a non-backbone context recently. My solution was to examine the top-level item and "normalize" it to fit the pattern that the children were expected to follow. Perhaps that's what you were trying to do here (and I'm just missing it):

initialize: function(){
    if (this.model){
      this.collection = this.model.nodes;
    }
}

Though I would have expected something more like:

initialize: function() {
    var items = this.model;
    if(_.isArray(item)) {
        this.model = { nodes: items };
    }
}

Again, I'm pretty ignorant of backbone still. I suspect it's a bad idea to clobber the model like that.
I say to move ahead with it until it hurts, and if it starts to hurt then look for a better solution.

[mxriverlynn]

moving forward with the structure as-is