Select all child elements using selectAll() with no arguments

[mindrones]

I'd like to select all child elements using sel.selectAll() with no arguments, instead of having to use sel.selectAll('*'), because it's more concise and expressive: it just reads "select all", perfect to me.

What do you think?

[mbostock]

I’m in favor of parsimony and explicitness, and I think selection.selectAll("*") is both clear and easy to type if that’s the behavior you want. Making that the default behavior when there is no argument would make the behavior less obvious to someone reading the code.

[mindrones]

OK, thanks!

[adumesny]

would have to agree with @mindrones . I expected selectAll() to just work (I was doing selectAll('g') but now need to support different children), and instead had to find this solution.
But then again I want to select just immediate children not all nested nodes... so looks like I need to look somewhere else anyway...

[mbostock]

I’d support selection.selectAll() throwing an error, though I’d want to use arguments.length to check because selection.selectAll(undefined) should be equivalent to selection.selectAll("undefined").

[adumesny]

while I have your attention :) seems like selecting all your immediate children ought to be dead simple... this is what I had to use, and complains in Typescript even with latest @types/selection (so have to cast to any - yuck)

this.container.selectAll(function() {return this.childNodes;} as any)

(where container is selection of my svg root).
Would have been nice to have a selectChildren() (which could take for example 'g' for immediate node instead of all nested g, or empty for '*') shortcut for what might be very common - see https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20569670/d3-selector-for-immediate-children

[mbostock]

Yeah, I could see selection.selectChildren (and selection.selectChild?) as being useful, and I could imagine the selector being optional there. I’d use element.children instead of element.childNodes, however, since you wouldn’t want to select text nodes.

[adumesny]

should I file a separate request to have selection.selectChildren ?