Backbone Inspector

Forked Ember Inspector, for Backbone Views instead.

Backbone Inspector is a Google Chrome Inspector extension for Backbone developers. It displays a sidebar panel in the Inspector which provides information about the Backbone view backing the currently selected element in the DOM. It also assigns the view object to a global variable _V which can then be used within the console for further inspecting.

Backbone Notes

• Backbone doesn't keep track of views the same way Ember does, so for now I've just hacked something on top of Backbone just as a proof on concept.
• Put somewhere: window.BackboneViews = {};
• Inside Backbone.View, add the line: window.BackboneViews[this.cid] = this;
• Inside _ensureElement, add the line: attrs['data-bb-view'] = this.cid;
• This gives each view element a data-bb-view attribute matching its internal cid, and keeps track of them window.BackboneViews.
• There's probably a better way to do this, just hacking about to get something awesome.

How to use it

• In Google Chrome, go to chrome://flags/ and enable Experimental Extension APIs. Relaunch your browser.
• Open Tools-->Extensions (ensure Development mode is checked) and click on "Load unpacked extension..." to install the extension. You will need to reload Chrome once the extension is installed.

Wish list

• Customizable property watchlist
• Configurable global variable (change default _V to something else)
• Display clickable parentView and childViews

Release Notes

v1.1

• Display the first ancestor backed by an Ember view if the selected element does not have one.
• When displaying an ancestor, the attribute "distance" shows the number of DOM levels it is away from the selected element.