Back to Angular 1 for today’s post as I’ve been doing some work on an older project today. As we all know, in the old days of the web, you could scroll to items within the page by using an <a> element with a hash reference, like:

<a href="#thing-to-scroll-to">scroll here</a>

<h2 id="thing-to-scroll-to">My title</h2>

With the advent of single-page sites and multiple ajax pages under them however, the hash section of a query parameter is increasingly unable to be used. On Angular 1 with angular-route this becomes impossible.

So what if for example you want to have some references at the top of a page within an Angular application which will scroll the user down to certain sections below, just like the hash references used to do? There are a number of suggestions on the internet for this but they are not very reusable, so I decided to create a simple directive that does this:

app.directive('clickScrollTo', function () {
    return {
        restrict: 'A',
        scope: {
            clickScrollTo: '@'
        },
        link: function (scope, el, attr) {
            el.click(function(event) {
                var main_page = $('.main-page');
                event.preventDefault();
                main_page
                    .stop()
                    .animate(
                        { scrollTop: main_page.scrollTop() + $(scope.clickScrollTo).offset().top },
                        500,
                        'linear'
                    );
            });
        }
    }
});

This is slightly complicated by the fact that I am using an element with class="main-page" with overflow: auto set to contain the scrollable section of the app. If you don’t have a layout like this just replace the $('.main-page') part with $('body').

Then you can easily create elements like:

<span class="a" click-scroll-to="#more-benefits">click here</span>
...
<div id="more-benefits">...</div>