ExtJS 4 MVC multiple instances of views and sub/child controller difficulties

Question

I have encountered a problem with the MVC pattern in ExtJS 4. At least, I think I have. Having approached multiple people with this question, and having posted numerous times in

Answer 1

I was faced with a similar problem:

Consider a tabpanel for a CRM type application which opens new instances of a view for each client. And say that tab view contains 3 or 4 row-editing gridpanels for interacting with different collections of data relating to that client.

The solution I came up with was based on this from the Sencha forums. In a nut shell, almost all events that are dispatched from a view contain a reference to the view itself. The handlers in my controller's control function all use these to get a reference to the correct view instance.

For dealing with the multiple instances of the same store needed for this, I took this to heart from that post:

For the Store instance on the view or a global one... depends on the needs. If you are going to use globally then make it global. If you only are going to need it on the view then put it on the view. MVC is not a law, you can change it to fit your needs. Technically the Controller part of MVC is suppose to be the middle man between the View and Model parts but sometimes that's just not needed. I create the Store in the view 95% of the time. I'll give you an example...

If you have a Store for products, you probably only need to reference that Store in your Grid. That usually isn't needed for other parts of the application. However, if you have a Store to load countries, I often need it globally so I only have to load it once and can then set/use that Store in several views.

So I just created the needed store's that relate to a view instance specifically, inside the view's initComponent method. The application did have a few global stores that I created as store classes following the MVC recommendations. It worked out nicely to encapsulate the view instance stores inside the view. Then I only needed one instance of the controller.

To answer your question specifically, currently, there is no ExtJS official recommendation or config for dealing with multiple instances of the same view that use the same store constructor. I have spent some time looking for something like that and the best I have found was this recommendation from one of their forum moderators.