ScrollTo function in AngularJS

I’m trying to get a quick nav to work correctly. It’s floating on the side. When they click on a link, it takes them to that ID on the page. I’m following this guide from Treehouse. This is what I have for the scrolling:

$("#quickNav a").click(function(){
    var quickNavId = $(this).attr("href");
    $("html, body").animate({scrollTop: $(location).offset().top}, "slow");
    return false;
});

I initially placed it before the </body>. But I seem to be running into a race condition where that was firing before the quickNav compiled (it has a ng-hide placed on it, not sure if that’s causing it – but it is within the DOM).

If I run that block of code in the console, then the scrolling works as expected.

I figured it’d be more effective to move this into the controller – or more likely within a directive. But I’m not having luck accomplishing that. How can I get this block of code to work with AngularJS?

Answer

Here is a simple directive that will scroll to an element on click:

myApp.directive('scrollOnClick', function() {
  return {
    restrict: 'A',
    link: function(scope, $elm) {
      $elm.on('click', function() {
        $("body").animate({scrollTop: $elm.offset().top}, "slow");
      });
    }
  }
});

Demo: http://plnkr.co/edit/yz1EHB8ad3C59N6PzdCD?p=preview

For help creating directives, check out the videos at http://egghead.io, starting at #10 “first directive”.

edit: To make it scroll to a specific element specified by a href, just check attrs.href.

myApp.directive('scrollOnClick', function() {
  return {
    restrict: 'A',
    link: function(scope, $elm, attrs) {
      var idToScroll = attrs.href;
      $elm.on('click', function() {
        var $target;
        if (idToScroll) {
          $target = $(idToScroll);
        } else {
          $target = $elm;
        }
        $("body").animate({scrollTop: $target.offset().top}, "slow");
      });
    }
  }
});

Then you could use it like this: <div scroll-on-click></div> to scroll to the element clicked. Or <a scroll-on-click href="#element-id"></div> to scroll to element with the id.