Impossible Backbone Zombies

I've been trying to debug my Backbone multi-page app for most of the day now to get rid of 'zombies', but unfortunately to no avail. Before today, I didn't even realize I have a zo

Solution 1:

One problem I see is that your close function never removes the event delegator from the view's el. A view's events are handled by using the delegator form of jQuery's on to attach a single event handler to the view's el. Your close does:

this.$el.empty();

but that only removes the content and any event handlers attached to that content, it does nothing at all to the handlers attached directly to this.el. Consider this minimal example:

var V = Backbone.View.extend({
    events: {
        'click': 'clicked'
    },
    clicked: function() {
        console.log('still here');
    }
});
var v = new V({ el: '#el' });
v.close();

After that, clicking on #el will throw a 'still here' in the console even though you think that the view has been fully cleaned up. Demo: http://jsfiddle.net/ambiguous/aqdq7pwm/

Adding an undelegateEvents call to your close should take care of this problem.

---

General advice:

1. Don't use the old-school on and off functions for events, use listenTo and stopListening instead. listenTo keeps track of the events on the listener so it is easier to remove them all later.

2. Simplify your close to just this:

   Backbone.View.prototype.close = function() {
     if(this.onClose)
       this.onClose();
     if(this.views)
       _.invoke(this.views, 'close');
     this.remove();
   };
   

3. Don't bind views to existing els. Let the view create (and own) its own el and let the caller place that el into a container with the usual:

   var v = new View();
   container.append(v.render().el);
   

   pattern. If you must attach to an existing el then the view should override remove with a slightly modified version of the standard implementation:

   remove: function() {
     this.$el.empty();        // Instead of removing the element.
     this.undelegateEvents(); // Manually detach the event delegator.
     this.stopListening();
     return this;
   }
   

Solution 2:

I'm pretty sure I found the root for my problem.

mu is too short was right, with the close() method I wasn't removing the events bound directly to my el (which I tried to do by this.off() - this.$el.off()/this.undelegateEvents() is the correct way). But for me, it only fixed the problem that events got called multiple times unnecessarily.

The reason I was plagued by 'zombie views' or unintended behavior was that I wasn't freeing up the memory in the View..

this.remove() only gets rid of the el and it's elements/events, but not the View's internal variables. To elaborate - in my View I have an array declared like so this.array: [] and I didn't have it freed in the onClose function.

All I had to do was empty it in the onClose function or initially declare the array as this.array: null so on recurrent View renderings it would at least free the previous array (it still should be freed on the onClose method though, because the array/object is still going to sit in the memory until browsing away from the page).

It was excruciating to debug, because it's a crossword game (at least my code is hard to read there) and sometimes the words didn't match up, but I didn't know where the problem was coming from.

Lessons learned.