How to force a view refresh without having it trigger automatically from an observable?

Note: this is mostly for debugging and understanding KnockoutJS.

Is there a way to explicitly request Knockout to refresh the view from (already bound) view model? I am looking for something like:

ko.refreshView();

I understand that this is not an intended use of Knockout, but I still want to know if there is a such method for debugging and learning purposes.

You can't call something on the entire viewModel, but on an individual observable you can call myObservable.valueHasMutated() to notify subscribers that they should re-evaluate. This is generally not necessary in KO, as you mentioned.

In some circumstances it might be useful to simply remove the bindings and then re-apply:

ko.cleanNode(document.getElementById(element_id))
ko.applyBindings(viewModel, document.getElementById(element_id))

I have created a JSFiddle with my bindHTML knockout binding handler here: https://jsfiddle.net/glaivier/9859uq8t/

First, save the binding handler into its own (or a common) file and include after Knockout.

If you use this switch your bindings to this:

<div data-bind="bindHTML: htmlValue"></div>

OR

<!-- ko bindHTML: htmlValue --><!-- /ko -->