Two way binding in reactive forms

Question

Using Angular 2, two-way binding is easy in template-driven forms - you just use the banana box syntax. How would you replicate this behavior in a model-driven form?

For example, here is a standard reactive form. Let's pretend it's much more complicated than it looks, with lots and lots of various inputs and business logic, and therefore more appropriate for a model-driven approach than a template-driven approach.

    export class ExampleModel {
        public name: string;
        // ... lots of other inputs
    }

    @Component({
        template: `
            <form [formGroup]="form">
                <input type="text" formControlName="name">
                ... lots of other inputs
            </form>

            <h4>Example values: {{example | json}}</h4>
        `
    })
    export class ExampleComponent {
        public form: FormGroup;
        public example: ExampleModel = new ExampleModel();

        constructor(private _fb: FormBuilder) {
            this.form = this._fb.group({
                name: [ this.example.name, Validators.required ]
                // lots of other inputs
            });
        }

        this.form.valueChanges.subscribe({
            form => {
                console.info('form values', form);
            }
        });
    }

In the subscribe() I can apply all sorts of logic to the form values and map them as necessary. However, I don't want to map every input value from the form. I just want to see the values for the entire employee model as it updates, in a approach similar to [(ngModel)]="example.name", and as displayed in the json pipe in the template. How can I accomplish this?

Answer 1

Note: as mentioned by @Clouse24, "Using Reactive Froms with ngModel is deprecated in angular 6 and will be removed in a future version of Angular" (which means that the answer below will no longer be supported in the future). Please read the link to see the reasoning for deprecation and to see what alternatives you will have.

You can use [(ngModel)] with Reactive forms.

template

<form [formGroup]="form">
  <input name="first" formControlName="first" [(ngModel)]="example.first"/>
  <input name="last" formControlName="last" [(ngModel)]="example.last"/>
</form>

component

export class App {
  form: FormGroup;
  example = { first: "", last: "" };

  constructor(builder: FormBuilder) {
    this.form = builder.group({
      first: "",
      last: ""
    });
  }
}

Plunker

This will a completely different directive than the one that would be used without the formControlName. With reactive forms, it will be the FormControlNameDirective. Without the formControlName, the NgModel directive would be used.