title: Access a DOM element in Aurelia
body: <p>How would you go about accessing a DOM element in Aurelia? This is a broad and general question, but I have a feeling there are one or two preferred ways to do this. I have two current cases in Aurelia now:</p>
  
  <p>In the template I have a form. I want to access the form element in the view-model, on VM canDeactivate(), to interrupt a user navigating away from a half filled out form. So the scope in which I'm trying to access the element can be considered local.</p>
  
  <p>In another view-model I want to hide navigation on VM activate(). Navigation resides in another view-model/template pair so the scope may be considered global.</p>