Binding for "change" in backbone model not working

Question

Here's the Example

I was following this excellent tutorial by Thomas Davis : What is a model? Somehow the 'change' binding is not firing. What am I doing wrong here?

Answer 1

Backbone is checking if the set value is the same as the previous value (look at https://github.com/documentcloud/backbone/blob/master/backbone.js#L210 and on).

In your example, the array is still the same but the value inside changed. This is tricky to solve. Creating a new copy of the array seems to be overhead. I would suggest to call the change event directly in your adopt function as a solution:

adopt: function(newChildsName){
  var children_array = this.get('children');
  children_array.push(newChildsName);
  this.set({children:children_array});
  this.trigger("change:children");
}

I would suggest to create an issue on backbone github repository to maybe add a "force" option to force the update (thus triggering the event) of attributes on a model.