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Dave,

There currently isn't an API to support this, it is something I've been thinking about and wanting to build in. The way you are currently looking inside of the `views` object and referencing a view's `instance` property is currently the only way to do it.

The issue with `instance` being `null` is that the view must be "attached" and therefore become the `activeView` (via the `showView()` method) before it will be registered on the `instance` property.
https://github.com/yui/yui3/blob/master ... se.js#L444

The `preserve` config option flags the "detach" process to not destroy the view and to leave `instance` pointing to it.

Back to your original task of applying new data to an existing view, this is possibile as of 3.5.1. When calling the `showView()` method, you can pass options, and there are two newer options that you'll be interested in: `update`, and `render`. This gives you control over updating the attributes of an existing view, and whether or not you want to re-render that existing view. The `update` option was added specifically for this use case.



You can see more details on these options that can be passed to `showView()` here:
http://yuilibrary.com/yui/docs/app/#und ... ew-options

Dave, Roman brings up a good point, I might have been reading too far into your question. Like Roman pointed out, passing a callback function to `showView()` will result in that function being called with the view instance being passed as an argument.