How to use ResolveComponentFactory() but with a string as a key
It's either defining a map of available components,
const compMap = { text: PictureBoxWidget, image: TextBoxWidget};Or defining identifiers as static class property that will be used to generate a map,
const compMap = [PictureBoxWidget, TextBoxWidget].map(widget => [widget.id, widget]).reduce((widgets, [id, widget]) => Object.assign(widgets, { [id]: widget }), {});The map is then used like
let compFactory: ComponentFactory;if (componentName in compMap) { compFactory = this.compFactoryResolver.resolveComponentFactory(compMap[componentName]);} else { throw new Error(`Unknown ${componentName} component`);}There's no way how component classes can be magically identified as strings, because they aren't resolved to strings in Angular 2 DI (something that was changed since Angular 1, where all DI units were annotated as strings).