with ngClass and ngStyle being deprecated we will need to investigate how this will affect ngx-layout and what we will need to replace it with, [class.xxx] [style.xxx]?

[DuncanFaulkner]

Proposal

What is the summary of the proposal?

ngClass and ngStyle being deprecated

What is the proposal?

look at a replacement

Is there anything else we should know?

[DuncanFaulkner]

Investigated — current status & impact

Status: NgClass/NgStyle are only soft-deprecated (Angular's Nov 2024 announcement), not formally @deprecated — there's no @deprecated tag on them in @angular/common@22, and no removal is scheduled. Angular recommends native [class]/[style] bindings for basic cases, while keeping NgClass/NgStyle for advanced cases (space-separated keys, unit suffixes, string/array/Set inputs).

How it affects ngx-layout — two layers:

1. Public selectors [ngClass.xs], [ngStyle.md], etc. are our own directives; they just mirror the names. No reason to rename — that would be a needless breaking change.
2. Internal engine (the real dependency): ClassDirective and StyleDirective currently instantiate new NgClass(...) / new NgStyle(...) (extended/class/class.ts, extended/style/style.ts) and delegate to them as a diff/apply engine via .ngClass=/.ngStyle= + .ngDoCheck(). Those constructor signatures are Angular private internals and have changed across majors — so a future hard-removal/refactor would break us regardless of what consumers write in templates.

Replacement direction: not [class.xxx]/[style.xxx] as the title guesses — those are template bindings and can't serve as an imperative engine inside a directive. The forward path is to apply classes/styles directly with Renderer2 (addClass/removeClass, setStyle/removeStyle) plus a KeyValueDiffers diff — exactly what NgClass/NgStyle do internally, and what our own StyleUtils.applyStyleToElement already does elsewhere in the lib.

Recommendation: no urgent action needed (soft-deprecation only, no removal date). Tracking this as future-proofing: reimplement the two directives' internals on Renderer2 to drop the hard dependency on @angular/common's NgClass/NgStyle classes, keeping the public selector API unchanged.