How to subscribe to an event on a service in Angular2?

Question

I know how to raise an event with the EventEmitter. I can also attach a method to be called if I have a component like this:

Answer 1

Update: I have found a better/proper way to solve this problem using a BehaviorSubject or an Observable rather than an EventEmitter. Please see this answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/35568924/215945

Also, the Angular docs now have a cookbook example that uses a Subject.

---

Original/outdated/wrong answer: again, don't use an EventEmitter in a service. That is an anti-pattern.

Using beta.1... NavService contains the EventEmiter. Component Navigation emits events via the service, and component ObservingComponent subscribes to the events.

nav.service.ts

import {EventEmitter} from 'angular2/core';
export class NavService {
  navchange: EventEmitter<number> = new EventEmitter();
  constructor() {}
  emitNavChangeEvent(number) {
    this.navchange.emit(number);
  }
  getNavChangeEmitter() {
    return this.navchange;
  }
}

components.ts

import {Component} from 'angular2/core';
import {NavService} from '../services/NavService';

@Component({
  selector: 'obs-comp',
  template: `obs component, item: {{item}}`
})
export class ObservingComponent {
  item: number = 0;
  subscription: any;
  constructor(private navService:NavService) {}
  ngOnInit() {
    this.subscription = this.navService.getNavChangeEmitter()
      .subscribe(item => this.selectedNavItem(item));
  }
  selectedNavItem(item: number) {
    this.item = item;
  }
  ngOnDestroy() {
    this.subscription.unsubscribe();
  }
}

@Component({
  selector: 'my-nav',
  template:`
    <div class="nav-item" (click)="selectedNavItem(1)">nav 1 (click me)</div>
    <div class="nav-item" (click)="selectedNavItem(2)">nav 2 (click me)</div>
  `,
})
export class Navigation {
  item = 1;
  constructor(private navService:NavService) {}
  selectedNavItem(item: number) {
    console.log('selected nav item ' + item);
    this.navService.emitNavChangeEvent(item);
  }
}

Plunker

Answer 2

Using alpha 28, I accomplished programmatically subscribing to event emitters by way of the eventEmitter.toRx().subscribe(..) method. As it is not intuitive, it may perhaps change in a future release.