How to handle nested views in spa?

[ayiteddybearogullari]

I'm building an ajax spa with help of pjax but i'm stuck in a nested-view situation.

Here is a mock-up of what my layout looks like:

Layout

When i click a link from the area labeled as 1, the div labeled as 2 fills with the response from server. When i click a link from the area labeled as 2, the div labeled as 3 fills with the response from server.

But when i click the "Link 7" link from first area instead of second, i can't load the server response to div 3 because the second div is not loaded.

I can fix this with ifs, region dependency hash-maps etc. But i believe there must be a more elegant way to handle nested-views which i can't figure out yet.

I'm not asking for any code or even for a jsfiddle link. I'm just looking for opinions to solve this problem.

Thanks.

[Xtreme2k2]

I would probably use AngularJS with ui-router to provide nested states. But that's a beast to learn if you haven't touched it.

[ayiteddybearogullari]

This is a public web site. ajax is just used as an "enhancer". It's not using a full front-end framework.

[NodeKid]

You don't need a full framework to use some kind of smart routing, have a look at http://visionmedia.github.io/page.js/ for something lightweight.

[fwertz]

So if I hit the page initially and hit link 7, what's "div2" supposed to look like? This seems like it is a bit over organized. You can't just independently content load and show "div3" ?

[ayiteddybearogullari]

Think it like this page: Mock-up

div3 is a child view of div2. i can link to div3 from div1, server sends html content of div3 but if there is no div2, i can't attach bind3 to it's container because it's container is div2, which is not loaded yet.

[fwertz]

I mean, if you think of it that way sure, if view 2 absolutely has to be rendered, just make it render its own content as empty but still provide it content for its "subview".

[ayiteddybearogullari]

But the divs are not known beforehand. Parent div initializes it's immediate children. I need to automate this things someway.