One situation I encountered involved obtaining the bounding client rectangle internally and using it to position a container relative to the viewport, such as a context menu.
In Angular, you can utilize
@ViewChild('hashedId') someVar!: T;ElementRef; this information is only provided in the API (which uses the term "selector", leading me to believe it was referring to a CSS selector).
It functions correctly because the ElementRef contains a property called nativeElement, which represents the DOM element. The hashedId refers to that element (referred to as a selector by the API):
<tag #hashedId/>
In my particular scenario, hashedId, within the entire template, was identified as a HTMLDivElement (an Element).
I implemented the following code:
@ViewChild('containerElement')
private containerElement!: Element;
// ...
ngAfterViewInit(): void {
console.log(this.containerElement);
}
Even though there were no compilation errors during development, the IDE logged an ElementRef. This discrepancy may be due to TypeScript's inherent nature of being loosely typed and translating to JavaScript under the hood. I assumed that Angular's build system would handle this automatically?
@ViewChild('containerElement')
private containerElement!: ElementRef;