When viewOrForm.$el is undefined, use $.find, not $.children?

[david-davidson]

Hi there,

I just ran into trouble with form serialization in a Marionette app. Turns out my problem involved Syphon's getForm function--specifically, the fact that it uses $.children, not $.find, to look for form inputs when passed a specific form, not a view.

My use case: I was passing a form to Syphon using Syphon.serialize(this.$('#my-form-id')[0]). (My view was a CompositeView whose $el included other forms [introduced by child views], so .serialize(this) would be too broad.) The form in question looked roughly like this:

<form id="my-form-id">
  <div class="row">
    <div class="form-group">
      <label for="name">Thing name</label>
      <input class="form-control" name="name"></input>
    </div>
  </div>
  <div class="row">
    <div class="form-group">
      <label for="info">Thing description</label>
      <textarea class="form-control" name="info"></textarea>
    </div>
  </div>
  <button type="submit" class="btn disabled">Save</button>
</form>

...that is, with multiple levels between the outer <form> tags and the inputs that I care about.

Within Syphon, in getForm, _.isUndefined(viewOrForm.$el) returned true, since the form itself doesn't have an $el. That meant getForm returned $(viewOrForm).children(':input'). But since $.children only looks one level deep, Syphon didn't find any matching elements and didn't extract any data.

So: since Backbone.View.$, which you use to handle views, uses $.find, and since $.find would find everything $.children does, why not go with $.find here, like this? master...david-davidson:use-jquery-find

Thanks for your time, and for your tremendously useful product!

[rhubarbselleven]

Hi @david-davidson which version are you using?

[lysyiandrii]

Hi @rhubarbselleven, I agreed with @david-davidson. It would be great if getForm will use jquery find method instead children.

[david-davidson]

@rhubarbselleven, sorry for the delay! I'm on backbone.marionette: 2.4.1 and backbone.syphon: 0.6.0.

[rhubarbselleven]

Coolies, anyone interested in a quick PR?

[david-davidson]

Will do!

[rhubarbselleven]

Thanks for your perseverance on this one @david-davidson