title: Getting the value of a textfield in Polymer
body: <p>I have a simple paper-input that I'm trying to get the value from but for some reason I'm not having any luck. Here's a simplified version of the HTML where I set up the button and the onclick event:</p>
  
  <pre><code>  &lt;paper-action-dialog id="addAnnotation" transition="paper-dialog-transition-center"&gt;
          &lt;core-header-panel flex id="annotation-box"&gt;
              &lt;core-toolbar class="graph-sets-header"&gt;
                &lt;span flex&gt;TEST&lt;/span&gt;
              &lt;/core-toolbar&gt;
              &lt;br&gt;
              &lt;paper-input-decorator label="Add your annotation"&gt;
                  &lt;paper-autogrow-textarea&gt;
                      &lt;textarea id="annotationSource"&gt;&lt;/textarea&gt;
                  &lt;/paper-autogrow-textarea&gt;
              &lt;/paper-input-decorator&gt;
              &lt;paper-button dismissive hover &gt;Cancel&lt;/paper-button&gt;
              &lt;paper-button affirmative hover onclick="getAnnotation()"&gt;Submit&lt;/paper-button&gt;
          &lt;/core-header-panel&gt;
      &lt;/paper-action-dialog&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>and here's my JS function:</p>
  
  <pre><code>function getAnnotation(){
  
      var toolText = document.getElementById('annotationSource').value;
          console.log(toolText);
  
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Here's a plunker with most of it running (except I can't get the value of the paper-input to show in the console: <a href="http://plnkr.co/edit/1PAi13ISgP7mNXDMNStF?p=preview" rel="nofollow">http://plnkr.co/edit/1PAi13ISgP7mNXDMNStF?p=preview</a></p>
  
  <p>I'm sure  could make this a polymer template, but I need to pass the value to a bunch of other functions in the main HTML and I keep having problems with moving data in and out of a template so I'd like to avoid that if I can.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Adding some more flow to make it clearer*</strong>
  To bring up the annotation box you need to click on any of the points on the graph in the plunker - doing so brings up the paper-input box, which I want to use to create an annotation... eventually adding the annotation text to a tooltip that will appear by doing a mouse over on the dot that I generate</p>