Sidenav - provide means to open/close from non-child elements

[robwormald]

Bug, feature request, or proposal:

Given usage like:

<md-sidenav-container>
  <md-sidenav>
    <ul></ul>
  </md-sidenav>
  <my-component></my-component>
</md-sidenav-container>

Because my-component is not a child of the md-sidenav element, you can't inject MdSidenav into it, which makes programmatically toggling the Sidenav rather difficult (either you end up having to @ViewChild() query for it, and wiring that all up through your own service)

What is the expected behavior?

Developers should have an easy way to programmatically control the md-sidenav

What is the current behavior?

See above

Is there anything else we should know?

Material 1 provided a $sideNav service, which is the kind of thing i'm describing here: https://material.angularjs.org/latest/api/service/$mdSidenav

[EladBezalel]

@jelbourn do we want to stick with the component-id functionality from material1 or do you have something else in mind?

[jelbourn]

@robwormald I took a look at this, and MdSidenavContainer does let you do this already. The tricky thing is that the container can have two MdSidenav instances (one on the left and one on the right). You get these through sidenavContainer.start and sidenavContainer.end. Maybe not the best names, but it exposes the instance.

@EladBezalel ideally people who are just using one sidenav would want to just inject MdSidenav and get the instance they care about, but I'm not sure we have any mechanism to do this. Creating a separate service and getting the sidenav by some name/id is about the same as injecting MdSidenavContainer and accessing the start/ end sidenav (which already works).

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