Access a DOM element in Aurelia

Question

How would you go about accessing a DOM element in Aurelia? This is a broad and general question, but I have a feeling there are one or two preferred ways to do this. I have two current cases in Aurelia now:

In the template I have a form. I want to access the form element in the view-model, on VM canDeactivate(), to interrupt a user navigating away from a half filled out form. So the scope in which I'm trying to access the element can be considered local.

In another view-model I want to hide navigation on VM activate(). Navigation resides in another view-model/template pair so the scope may be considered global.

Answer 1

As Rob suggested, use ref. For your example:

view

<form ref="myForm"></form>

viewModel

class ViewModel { 

    canDeactivate() {
        var form = this.myForm;
        // do stuffs
    }
}

For more information on the ref attribute, see here: http://aurelia.io/docs/binding/basics#function-references

Answer 2

Use binding system's ref capability. See the docs http://aurelia.io/docs/binding/basics#referencing-elements

Answer 3

Another option; if your view-model is exposed as a @customElement, its DOM element can be injected in the constructor:

@customElement
@inject(Element)
export class MyCustomElement {
    constrctor(element) {
        logger.info(element) // ==> <my-custom-element></my-custom-element>
    }
}