How to scroll to bottom in react?

Question

I want to build a chat system and automatically scroll to the bottom when entering the window and when new messages come in. How do you automatically scroll to the bottom of a container in React?

Answer 1

As Tushar mentioned, you can keep a dummy div at the bottom of your chat:

render () {
  return (
    <div>
      <div className="MessageContainer" >
        <div className="MessagesList">
          {this.renderMessages()}
        </div>
        <div style={{ float:"left", clear: "both" }}
             ref={(el) => { this.messagesEnd = el; }}>
        </div>
      </div>
    </div>
  );
}

and then scroll to it whenever your component is updated (i.e. state updated as new messages are added):

scrollToBottom = () => {
  this.messagesEnd.scrollIntoView({ behavior: "smooth" });
}

componentDidMount() {
  this.scrollToBottom();
}

componentDidUpdate() {
  this.scrollToBottom();
}

I'm using the standard Element.scrollIntoView method here.