NgSwitch Directive in Angular

Published on October 17, 2016

Angular

By Alligator.io

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.

Like ngFor and ngIf, ngSwitch is a built-in template directive. It behaves in a similar way as a JavaScript switch statement. Use it to include one of multiple possible element trees in the DOM.

This post covers Angular 2 and up

<div [ngSwitch]="dietSelection">
  <p *ngSwitchCase="'gf'">Gluten-free</p>
  <p *ngSwitchCase="'veg'">Vegetarian / Vegan</p>
  <p *ngSwitchCase="'paleo'">Paleo</p>
  <p *ngSwitchDefault>Standard diet</p>
</span>

In the above example, if dietSelection is set to ‘gf’, only the paragraph with Gluten-free will be included in the DOM. If that paragraph contained children DOM elements, these would also be included.

Notice how the syntax is slightly different than the syntax for ngIf or ngFor, with the ngSwitch used as a property binding and without the * character. Instead, the * goes with the ngSwitchCase and ngSwitchDefault directives, because they are the ones creating a template.