jquery: animate scrollLeft

Question

I'm quite new to jquery and can't seem to figure out why my code isn't working. I have a horizontal layout and want to use the scrollLeft() function (which works perfect with this code)

$("#next").click(function() {
    currentElement = currentElement.next();
    scrollTo(currentElement);    
});

function scrollTo(element) {
    $(window).scrollLeft(element.position().left);
}

But ideally, I would like to animate this so that when #next is clicked there is a nice animated effect to the scroll left function

$("#next").click(function() {
    currentElement = currentElement.next();
    scrollTo(currentElement);    
});

function scrollTo(element) {
    $(window).animate({scrollLeft: element.position().left}, 750);
}

But to no avail. What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

You'll want something like this:

$("#next").click(function(){
      var currentElement = currentElement.next();
      $('html, body').animate({scrollLeft: $(currentElement).offset().left}, 800);
      return false;
   }); 

I believe this should work, it's adopted from a scrollTop function.

Answer 2

First off I should point out that css animations would probably work best if you are doing this a lot but I ended getting the desired effect by wrapping .scrollLeft inside .animate

$('.swipeRight').click(function()
{

    $('.swipeBox').animate( { scrollLeft: '+=460' }, 1000);
});

$('.swipeLeft').click(function()
{
    $('.swipeBox').animate( { scrollLeft: '-=460' }, 1000);
});

The second parameter is speed, and you can also add a third parameter if you are using smooth scrolling of some sort.