bug: Accessing an IonList's children property always results in an empty collection

[ErikOnBike]

Prerequisites

• I have read the Contributing Guidelines.
• I agree to follow the Code of Conduct.
• I have searched for existing issues that already report this problem, without success.

Stencil Version

v4.36.1

Current Behavior

When an <ion-list> element is asked for its children, an empty collection is answered (in all situations). The internal property __children correctly recognises the children present.

Expected Behavior

The actual children (as present in the property __children) should be answered.

System Info

Steps to Reproduce

• Go to IonList page of the Ionic components: https://ionicframework.com/docs/api/list
• Open dev console
• Enter: document.body.querySelector("ion-list").children
• Result: empty collection
• Enter document.body.querySelector("ion-list").__children
• Result: non-empty collection

Code Reproduction URL

(see reproduction steps above)

Additional Information

I think the recent updates wrt patching components (#6349) incorrectly concludes that the IonList element has slots. The IonList has a render function on some template, but it does not contain an explicit slot element.

[johnjenkins]

hey @ErikOnBike - thanks for raising.
Yeah - this is valid I think hadRenderFn was used as a proxy for 'component with internals that should not be exposed' which in this case doesn't work. Something like hasSlot (which doesn't currently exist) would be better.

[ErikOnBike]

Probably related (and already present in earlier versions of Ionic), when executing the following code the childNodes is an empty Array. The __childNodes is a NodeList with a single item. The later is correct, the first not (I presume).

let label = document.createElement("ion-label");
label.textContent = "Hello world";
console.log(label.childNodes); // Empty Array
console.log(label.__childNodes); // NodeList with a Text Node

[johnjenkins]

Hey @ErikOnBike - hm this sounds like a different issue, ion label does have a slot - so this looks to be more of an issue with the patched textContent. Don’t suppose you’d mind raising another ticket?

[ErikOnBike]

NP I'll add another issue.

[ErikOnBike]

Thx for looking into this. @johnjenkins