I recently ran into some frustration as I was doing some refactoring and my databinding stopped working for some view. Turned out I misspelled “viewmodel” where it should’ve been “viewModel” and it didn’t get declared for one of the views. As a result, a simple HTML bind like this stopped working:
xtype: 'component', bind:'<div class="stacked-label-group">' + '<div class="label-title">{i18n:translate("appointment_info.appt_info.promise_time")}</div>' + '<div class="label-value">{promisedDateOrWaiter}</div>' + '</div>' |
Turned out that I didn’t have a “promisedDateOrWaiter” to bind to (since I didn’t actually have a view model), which caused even the label data binding to fail to render (even though that one did exist at a different higher level). So the danger with these view models is that even if one of many fails in the binding, the whole binding fails (at least in case of html type of bindings).
Unfortunately this isn’t easy to troubleshoot as there are no error messages in the console or exceptions to pause on.
However, Sencha does offer an Inspection tool: https://www.sencha.com/products/inspector/
I evaluated it and one of the features it offers is being able to catch faulty bindings like this one. The ironic part is that you need to purchase a “premium” license to get the tool, which is almost double the cost of the standard license just to get the framework. I really hope Sencha will write some tutorials on how to debug these data bindings effectively without the custom tool.