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Ben Nadel at Scotch On The Rock (SOTR) 2010 (London) with: David Boyer
Ben Nadel at Scotch On The Rock (SOTR) 2010 (London) with: David Boyer

You Cannot Project Static Content Into The Root Component In Angular 2.0.0

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Published in

Lately, I've been thinking about the idea of an application loading screen in Angular 2 and I wanted to test something I've never tried before: projecting static content into the root component in an Angular 2 application. Long-story, short - it doesn't work. It doesn't throw an error or anything - the projected content is simply omitted.

Run this demo in my JavaScript Demos project on GitHub.

To test this, I tried including child-content in my index file:

<!doctype html>
<html>
<head>
	<meta charset="utf-8" />

	<title>
		You Cannot Project Static Content Into The Root Component In Angular 2.0.0
	</title>

	<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="./demo.css"></link>

	<!-- Load libraries (including polyfill(s) for older browsers). -->
	<script type="text/javascript" src="../../vendor/angular2/2.0.0/node_modules/core-js/client/shim.min.js"></script>
	<script type="text/javascript" src="../../vendor/angular2/2.0.0/node_modules/zone.js/dist/zone.js"></script>
	<script type="text/javascript" src="../../vendor/angular2/2.0.0/node_modules/reflect-metadata/Reflect.js"></script>
	<script type="text/javascript" src="../../vendor/angular2/2.0.0/node_modules/systemjs/dist/system.src.js"></script>

	<!-- Load the Web Animations API polyfill for most browsers (basically any browser other than Chrome and Firefox). -->
	<!-- <script type="text/javascript" src="../../vendor/angular2/2.0.0/node_modules/web-animations-js/web-animations.min.js"></script> -->

	<!-- Configure SystemJS loader. -->
	<script type="text/javascript" src="./system.config.js"></script>
</head>
<body>

	<h1>
		You Cannot Project Static Content Into The Root Component In Angular 2.0.0
	</h1>

	<my-app>

		<p>
			Projected Content (from Index.htm)
		</p>

	</my-app>

</body>
</html>

As you can see, I have some test content in between the <my-app> tags. Ordinarily I would have something like , "Loading..." in this area, done with the expectation that this content would be replaced by the root component's template. But, in this case, I am attempting to use the core <ng-content> directive to project these static nodes into the root template:

// Import the core angular services.
import { Component } from "@angular/core";

@Component({
	selector: "my-app",
	template:
	`
		<p>
			Before (App)
		</p>

		<!-- WARNING: THIS DOES NOT WORK IN ROOT COMPONENT. -->
		<ng-content></ng-content>

		<p>
			After (App)
		</p>
	`
})
export class AppComponent {

	// I initialize the component.
	constructor() {

		// ...

	}

}

As you can see, I'm trying to project the content from the index page into the rendered app component. But, when we run this, we get the following output:

Projecting static content into the root component in Angular 2.0.0.

As you can see, the root component's template rendered properly; but, the projected content (from the index page) was omitted. I would generally consider this the expected behavior; but, I wasn't sure how it would behave. And now I know. And, knowing is half the battle!

Want to use code from this post? Check out the license.

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Ben Nadel