Angular 2+: Get child element of @ViewChild()

Question

How can I access the child elements (here: ) of @ViewChild() in Angular 2+ without explicit declaration?

In template.htm

Answer 1

You can use the nativeElement property of the ElementRef given by ViewChild to get the corresponding HTML element. From there, standard DOM methods and properties give access to its children:

• element.children
• element.querySelector
• element.querySelectorAll
• etc.

For example:

@ViewChild("parent") private parentRef: ElementRef<HTMLElement>;

public getChildren() {
  const parentElement = this.parentRef.nativeElement;
  const firstChild = parentElement.children[0];
  const firstImage = parentElement.querySelector("img");
  ...
}

See this stackblitz for a demo.

Answer 2

In your case, when you need only one and first child.

this.parent.nativeElement.firstChild

Answer 3

HTML

<div #parent>
  <span id="child">
</div>

TS

 @ViewChild('parent',{static:false}) parentDiv:ElementRef
 this.parentDiv.nativeElement.firstChild

You can check this out if you want do any operations in it renderer2

Answer 4

use ViewChildren instead which gets all elements with same tag.

@ViewChildren('parent') parents: QueryList<any>;

To convert those elements to array:

const arr = this.parent.toArray();

Choose first element:

const el = arr[0]

Access child html of first element: const innerHtml = el.nativeElement.innerHtml;