Marionette.Application

The Application is used to model your Marionette application under a single entry point. The application provides:

• An obvious entry point to your app
• A clear hook for global events e.g. the AppRouter
• An interface to let you inject variables from the wider context into your app

The Application comes with a start method. This can be used to accomplish tasks before the rest of your application begins. Let's take a quick look at an example:

var Mn = require('backbone.marionette');

// Create our Application
var app = new Mn.Application();

// Start history when our application is ready
app.on('start', function() {
  Bb.history.start();
});

// Load some initial data, and then start our application
loadInitialData().then(function() {
  app.start();
});

Live example

In the simple example above, we could have just as easily started history after our initial data had loaded. This pattern becomes more useful as the startup phase of your application becomes more complex.

Documentation Index

• Root Layout
• Initialize
• Application Events
• Starting An Application
• Application Methods

Root Layout

As the Application is the entry point to your app, it makes sense that it will hold a reference to the root entry of your View tree. Marionette 3 has added this with the region attribute and showView. This example demonstrates how we can use this:

var Mn = require('backbone.marionette');
var RootView = require('./views/root');


var App = Mn.Application.extend({
  region: '#root-element',

  onStart: function() {
    this.showView(new RootView());
  }
});

var myApp = new App();
myApp.start();

Live example

This will immediately render RootView and fire the usual triggers such as before:attach and attach in addition to the before:render and render triggers.

Initialize

Like other objects in Backbone and Marionette, Applications have an initialize method. It is called immediately after the Application has been instantiated, and is invoked with the same arguments that the constructor received.

var Bb = require('backbone');
var Mn = require('backbone.marionette');

var App = Mn.Application.extend({
  initialize: function(options) {
    console.log('My value:', options.model.get('key'));
  }
});

// The application won't attach a model by default - this merely passes it into
// the options object to be, potentially, passed into views.
var app = new App({model: new Bb.Model({key: 'value'})});

Live example

Application Events

The Application object will fire two events:

before:start

Fired just before the application is started. Use this to prepare the application with anything it will need to start, for example setting up routers, models, and collections.

start

Fired as part of the application startup. This is where you should be showing your views and starting Backbone.history.

Application Lifecycle

When Application was initialized and start method was called a set of events will be called in a specific order.

Order	Event
1	before:start
2	start

var Bb = require('backbone');
var Mn = require('backbone.marionette');

var MyModel = require('./mymodel');
var MyView = require('./myview');

var App = Mn.Application.extend({
  region: '#root-element',

  initialize: function(options) {
    console.log('Initialize');
  },

  onBeforeStart: function() {
    this.model = new MyModel(this.options.data);
  },

  onStart: function() {
    this.showView(new MyView({model: this.model}));
    Bb.history.start();
  }
});

var app = new App(options);
app.start();

Live example

As we'll see below, the options object is passed into the Application as an argument to start.

Starting An Application

Once you have your application configured, you can kick everything off by calling: MyApp.start(options).

This function takes a single optional parameter. This parameter will be passed to each of your initializer functions, as well as the initialize events. This allows you to provide extra configuration for various parts of your app throughout the initialization sequence.

var App = Mn.Application.extend({
  region: '#root-element',

  initialize: function(options) {
    console.log('Initialize');
  },

  onBeforeStart: function(app, options) {
    this.model = new MyModel(options.data);
  },

  onStart: function(app, options) {
    this.showView(new MyView({model: this.model}));
    Bb.history.start();
  }
});

var app = new App();

app.start({
  data: {
    id: 1,
    text: 'value'
  }
});

Live example

Application Methods

The Marionette Application provides helper methods for managing its attached region.

getRegion()

Return the attached region object for the Application.

showView(View)

Display View in the region attached to the Application. This runs the View lifecycle.

getView()

Return the view currently being displayed in the Application's attached region. If the Application is not currently displaying a view, this method returns undefined.

Marionette.Object Methods

Marionette.Application extends Marionette.Object and, as such, implements the same method interface. See the Object reference for the full list.