Angular 2 @ViewChild annotation returns undefined

I had a similar issue and thought I'd post in case someone else made the same mistake. First, one thing to consider is AfterViewInit; you need to wait for the view to be initialized before you can access your @ViewChild. However, my @ViewChild was still returning null. The problem was my *ngIf. The *ngIf directive was killing my controls component so I couldn't reference it.

import {Component, ViewChild, OnInit, AfterViewInit} from 'angular2/core';
import {ControlsComponent} from './controls/controls.component';
import {SlideshowComponent} from './slideshow/slideshow.component';

@Component({
    selector: 'app',
    template:  `
        <controls *ngIf="controlsOn"></controls>
        <slideshow (mousemove)="onMouseMove()"></slideshow>
    `,
    directives: [SlideshowComponent, ControlsComponent]
})

export class AppComponent {
    @ViewChild(ControlsComponent) controls:ControlsComponent;

    controlsOn:boolean = false;

    ngOnInit() {
        console.log('on init', this.controls);
        // this returns undefined
    }

    ngAfterViewInit() {
        console.log('on after view init', this.controls);
        // this returns null
    }

    onMouseMove(event) {
         this.controls.show();
         // throws an error because controls is null
    }
}

Hope that helps.

EDIT
As mentioned by @Ashg below, a solution is to use @ViewChildren instead of @ViewChild.

The issue as previously mentioned is the ngIf which is causing the view to be undefined. The answer is to use ViewChildren instead of ViewChild. I had similar issue where I didn't want a grid to be shown until all the reference data had been loaded.

html:

   <section class="well" *ngIf="LookupData != null">
       <h4 class="ra-well-title">Results</h4>
       <kendo-grid #searchGrid> </kendo-grid>
   </section>

Component Code

import { Component, ViewChildren, OnInit, AfterViewInit, QueryList  } from '@angular/core';
import { GridComponent } from '@progress/kendo-angular-grid';

export class SearchComponent implements OnInit, AfterViewInit
{
    //other code emitted for clarity

    @ViewChildren("searchGrid")
    public Grids: QueryList<GridComponent>

    private SearchGrid: GridComponent

    public ngAfterViewInit(): void
    {

        this.Grids.changes.subscribe((comps: QueryList <GridComponent>) =>
        {
            this.SearchGrid = comps.first;
        });


    }
}

Here we are using ViewChildren on which you can listen for changes. In this case any children with the reference #searchGrid. Hope this helps.