Angular ui-router scroll to top, not to ui-view

Question

I\'ve just upgraded to ui-router 0.2.8 from 0.2.0 and I\'ve noticed that when the state changes, the scroll position jumps to the top of te child <

Answer 1

Most of the time it's not enough just to scroll to the top of the page. It is always a good idea to respect anchor links and to scroll to the specific place in the loaded content designated by location's hash.

Here's the code I use to implement this strategy:

module.run(function (
  $rootScope,
  $timeout,
  $location,
  $uiViewScroll
) {

  // Scrolling when screen changed.
  $rootScope.$on('$viewContentLoaded', function () {
    $timeout(performAutoScroll, 0);
  });


  function performAutoScroll () {
    var hash = $location.hash();
    var element =
         findDomElement('#' + hash)
      || findDomElement('a[name="' + hash + '"]')
      || angular.element(window.document.body)
    ;
    $uiViewScroll(element);
  }
});

$viewContentLoaded is an event generated by Angular when content is loaded inside of the ui-view element. Actually, we need to postpone the execution of our code in order to move it to a next digest cycle. That way the content of the view element will be actually placed in the DOM tree, so we can query it. $timeout with zero delay trick is used for this purpose.

$uiViewScroll service, provided by UI Router is used to actually do the scrolling. We can pass a jQuery/jqLite element to it and it will scroll to it's top border.

We are getting the currect hash from the $location service and using it to find the proper element inside of the DOM tree. It could be either a element with id attribute or a link with name attribute. In case we can't find an element to scroll to we falling back to a body element (i.e. will scroll to the top of the page).

And the findDomElement is just a syntactic sugar. It defined like this:

/**
 * @param {string} selector
 * @returns {jQuery|null}
 */
function findDomElement (selector) {
  var result = $(selector);
  return (result.length > 0 ? result : null);
}

I hope this approach makes sense and will be useful to someone out there. Cheers!