Add ability to select the views $el via the selector

[asciidisco]

Hi,
first of all, thanks for this. This is the first sane approach & model <-> view bindings in backbone i´ve seen so far.

I recently was in the situation that i needed to change the 'view.el' elements class,
after digging into the sources i was not able to find a way to do that (maybe I missed smth.)

So, i added a 'custom selector' named ':el', by changing line 51 from

$el = self.$(selector);

to

$el = selector = ':el' ? self.$el : self.$(selector);

Now you can use your bindings to do smth. like this:

bindings: {
    ':el': {
        attributes: [{
            name: 'class',
            observe: 'hidden',
            format: 'toggleVisibility'
        }]
    }
}

Your thoughts?
Would love to see this in core.

Regards
Sebastian

[delambo]

@asciidisco This a great idea - I'm surprised I haven't needed this yet! I pushed this into master and I'll cut a tag and write some docs soon.

In your example, it looks like you are toggling visibility on the element. If so, I recently pushed some api changes to master which may help, or at least be more intuitive. For example:

bindings: {
  ':el': {
    modelAttr: 'hidden',
    // Turns on show/hide toggling, which will be toggled based on the `hidden` attributes change in truthiness.
    // May also define a callback function which should return true or false after the `hidden` attribute is changed.
    visible: true,
    // Optionally, if you want a better animation than the standard jQuery show()/hide(), you can define the
    // following key and callback, and manually show and hide the bound element.
    visibleFn: function($el, isVisible, attrName) {
      if (isVisible) $el.fadeIn('fast');
      else $el.fadeOut('fast');
    }
}