control_grouping.md

Control Grouping

In Angular 2, there are three basic built-in classes that help us to manage forms:

• Control - A Control is the most basic unit of a form, associated with individual fields of a form. Through a Control we can know the field's value, its state (whether it's valid or has been changed) and its errors.

• ControlGroup - A ControlGroup is a collection of Controls of fixed length. A ControlGroup is useful to define the validity of the group of controls as a whole, rather than validating each of them manually.

  When we define a form using the NgForm directive, automatically every form element creates an internal ControlGroup to hold all the Controls inside of it.

• ControlArray - A ControlArray is the same as a ControlGroup but with a variable length.

In the previous example, the exported template variable that we are getting from:

<form #regForm="ngForm" ...>

is in fact an instance of the NgForm directive, not directly an instance of the ControlGroup class. To get to the ControlGroup instance created internally by the NgForm directive, we need to access the property regForm.form.

Let's go back to our code. We now know that our form element has been upgraded with the NgForm directive, and because of that it has created an internal ControlGroup for us to hold a reference to its child controls. The problem is that at this point Angular doesn't recognize the nested fields as controls belonging to the form. To make this association explicit, we must use the directive ngControl on our form fields.

app/my-form.component.html

<form ...>

  <div>
    <label for="email">Email:</label>
    <input type="email" id="email" ngControl="email">
  </div>

  <div>
    <label for="password">Password:</label>
    <input type="password" id="password" ngControl="password">
  </div>

  <!-- ... -->
</form>

When we add the directive ngControl to the fields, Angular automatically registers these controls as part of the ControlGroup of the parent form.

Now, if we put the values "joe.satriani@gmail.com" as email and "secretpass" as password and click the register button, we get the correct values on the console.

Object {email: "joe.satriani@gmail.com", password: "secretpass"}

View Example