Lifecycle Hooks in Angular

Published on January 23, 2017

Angular gives us 8 hooks to allow us to tap into the lifecycle of our components and trigger actions at specific points in the lifecycle.

This post discusses lifecycle hooks in Angular 2 and up.

Here are the lifecycle hooks available, in the order in which they are invoked:

ngOnChanges: Called every time a data-bound input property changes. It’s called a first time before the ngOnInit hook. The hook receives a SimpleChanges object that contains the previous and current values for the data-bound inputs properties. This hook gets called often, so it’s a good idea to limit the amount of processing it does.
ngOnInit: Called once upon initialization of the component.
ngDoCheck: Use this hook instead of ngOnChanges for changes that Angular doesn’t detect. It gets called at every change detection cycle, so keeping what it does to a minimum is important for performance.
ngAfterContentInit: Called after content is projected in the component.
ngAfterContentChecked: Called after the projected content is checked.
ngAfterViewInit: Called after a component’s view or child view is initialized.
ngAfterViewChecked: Called after a component’s view or child view is checked.
ngOnDestroy: Called once when the component is destroyed and a good hook to use to cleanup and unsubscribe from observables.

ngOnInit

Let’s give you a simple example using the ngOnInit hook. The ngOnInit lifecycle hook is probably the one you’ll use most often. If you have a lot of processing to do when the component gets created, it’s good practice to do it in the ngOnInit hook rather than in the constructor:

import { Component, OnInit } from '@angular/core';

@Component({
  selector: 'my-app',
  templateUrl: './app.component.html'
})
export class AppComponent implements OnInit {
  constructor() {}

  ngOnInit() {
    this.setupData();
    this.doStuff();
    // ...
  }

  setupData() {
    // ...
  }

  doStuff() {
    // ...
  }
}

Notice how we import OnInit, but we implement it with the ngOnInit method. It’s the same principle for the other lifecycle hooks.

Multiple Lifecycle hooks

Implementing multiple hooks is just as easy:

import { Component, OnInit, OnDestroy } from '@angular/core';

@Component({
  selector: 'my-app',
  templateUrl: './app.component.html'
})
export class AppComponent implements OnInit, OnDestroy {
  constructor() {}

  ngOnInit() {
    console.log('Component Init');
  }

  ngOnDestroy() {
    console.log('Component Destroy');
  }
}

ngOnChanges

The ngOnChanges hook, with it’s SimpleChanges object, is a little different. Here’s how you would implement it. Let’s say we have a component used like this:

<my-todo [title]="title" [content]="content"></my-todo>

Now say that we want to do something when the title property changes:

Child Component: my-todo.component.ts

import { Component, Input, SimpleChanges, OnChanges }
  from '@angular/core';

@Component({
  // ...
})
export class MyTodoComponent implements OnChanges {
  @Input() title: string;
  @Input() content: string;
  constructor() { }

Thanks for learning with the DigitalOcean Community. Check out our offerings for compute, storage, networking, and managed databases.

Learn more about our products

About the author

Alligator

Author

See author profile

Alligator.io is a developer-focused resource that offers tutorials and insights on a wide range of modern front-end technologies, including Angular 2+, Vue.js, React, TypeScript, Ionic, and JavaScript.

See author profile

Category:

Tutorial

Tags:

Angular

While we believe that this content benefits our community, we have not yet thoroughly reviewed it. If you have any suggestions for improvements, please let us know by clicking the “report an issue“ button at the bottom of the tutorial.