Best practice for rendering data in the Backbone view templates

I was using backbone standalone for some time but currently I am trying to integrate it with Rails. Until now I used underscore templates and the question would be if it is possible to use Rails view helpers inside the template and if it is smart thing to do at all?

Update: Here is a simple example what I am talking about.

I have a list of messages and开发者_开发问答 I have a MessageView for each message, I want to render the avatar thumbnail of the message author, link to his profile and description when the message was posted. Also I use markdown for the message content. With underscore templates I don't have access to the helpers to achieve this so I am forced to create methods on the model itself which feels really wrong...

You should take a look at the EJS Embedded JavaScript Framework, which provides rails-like standard view helpers like link_to, url_for, and other form tags.

Of course, you will have to translate your custom rails templates in js, but it's a start !

I ran into the same problem where I wanted to reuse my templates between Backbone and Rails. I ran into stache before: https://github.com/agoragames/stache

You can read more about the setup here: http://slainer68.wordpress.com/2011/09/20/partial-reuse-between-rails-js-the-easy-way/

Right out of the box, your underscore templates are pure javascript, so, in that sense, you can't really embed rails helpers into them. You can, however, make those templates ejb's (or whatever templating system you use) and have rails render them. With so little information, it's impossible to figure out what your app does, but it does feel weird to me to do that. I think, typically, your javascript templates are used for rendering html on the host side after some js functionality. Maybe a better description of what you are trying to accomplish?

Update ...

So you have some set of relationships between messages and authors in your rails models correct? You'd do a similar thing in your backbone models. So, you've got a User model, and a Message model. User has_many Messages, and Message has_one User. You can model that out in backbone as well... see my answer here: Backbone set collection attribute (for the url)

You just need to describe the relationship on the backbone side.