Element: shadowRoot property

The Element.shadowRoot read-only property represents the shadow root hosted by the element.

Use Element.attachShadow() to add a shadow root to an existing element.

Value

A ShadowRoot object instance, or null if the associated shadow root was attached with its mode set to closed. (See Element.attachShadow() for further details).

Some built-in elements, such as <input> and <img>, have user-agent shadow roots that are closed to script. Therefore, their shadowRoot property is always null.

Examples

The following snippets are taken from our life-cycle-callbacks example (see it live also), which creates an element that displays a square of a size and color specified in the element's attributes.

Inside the <custom-square> element's class definition we include some life cycle callbacks that make a call to an external function, updateStyle(), which actually applies the size and color to the element. You'll see that we are passing it this (the custom element itself) as a parameter.

class Square extends HTMLElement {
 connectedCallback() {
 console.log("Custom square element added to page.");
 updateStyle(this);
 }
 attributeChangedCallback(name, oldValue, newValue) {
 console.log("Custom square element attributes changed.");
 updateStyle(this);
 }
}

In the updateStyle() function itself, we get a reference to the shadow DOM using Element.shadowRoot. From here we use standard DOM traversal techniques to find the <style> element inside the shadow DOM and then update the CSS found inside it:

function updateStyle(elem) {
 const shadow = elem.shadowRoot;
 const childNodes = Array.from(shadow.childNodes);
 childNodes.forEach((childNode) => {
 if (childNode.nodeName === "STYLE") {
 childNode.textContent = `
 div {
 width: ${elem.getAttribute("l")}px;
 height: ${elem.getAttribute("l")}px;
 background-color: ${elem.getAttribute("c")};
 }
 `;
 }
 });
}

Specifications

Browser compatibility