Does anybody know how to get hold of an element defined in a component template? Polymer makes it really easy with the $ and $$.
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I was just
You can get a handle to the DOM element via ElementRef by injecting it into your component's constructor:
ElementRef
constructor(private myElement: ElementRef) { ... }
Docs: https://angular.io/docs/ts/latest/api/core/index/ElementRef-class.html