I got this question in one of my tech Facebook groups today:

In Angular2, Is there anyway for dealing with forms rather than form tag??? As In AngularJS 1.x, there was <form> and <ng-form>.

Is there something like that in Angular2 or we must deal with form tag?!

And the answer is: Yes. It’s possible to create forms without the form tag in Angular 2, with a gotcha…

Here’s how:

Template Driven Forms

If you look for the selector for ngForm directive in Angular2, you’ll find it like that:

form:not([ngNoForm]):not([formGroup])
ngForm
[ngForm]

Note that last one. Any element with ngForm tag <ngForm ...> or attribute <any ngForm ... > should work.

Reference

Reactive Forms (Model Driven)

The selector for formGroup directive is:

[formGroup]

Which also means that any element with formGroup attribute should work.

Reference

Gotcha

There is a relatively-big bug with non-form elements used as forms in Angular 2. The submit events do not work.

The implementation is just not as mature as Angular 1.

I have raised a bug here in March, but it’s probably a low priority:

@angular/angular#7807

You might be able to comment on it stating your scenario to bring it some attention.

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