Listening to all scroll events on a page

Question

Background:

I'm writing a component that opens up a sub-menu on click. I can't know where this component will be placed on the page or how far it will be nested in areas that may have the overflow property set.

Given that the overflow may clip the sub-menu I am instead making the sub-menu itself be attached to the body giving it an absolute position and linking it via code to the original component. This takes care of the overflow issue.

Problem:

However if a user scrolls the sub-menu remains in place, rather than moving with its linked component, so I need to be able to listen to any and all scroll events that occur on the page so I can reposition the sub-menu appropriately.

If there's an easy way to listen to all scroll events or if there's another better way to do this component I would appreciate any input.

I've played around with JSFiddle and set up a sandbox but I haven't had any success nor have I found an answer on this site or anywhere else for that matter; though perhaps I was using the wrong search terms, I can't imagine that I'm the first to have this question.

EDIT

To address the close vote, I'm not asking help to debug an issue without providing code nor am I asking something that won't help anyone in the future. I'm asking how I would go about listening to all event of a certain type not matter where the may occur, which I find globally applicable, though perhaps that's subjective.

EDIT

$(window).on('scroll', function(){ /**/ }); is not an option as it only listens to the window scroll, not any nested scrolls.

$('#ex1 #ex2').on('scroll', function(){ /**/ }); is not an option as it requires the person who is implementing the code to be aware of any current or possible future areas on the page that may scroll.

Answer 1

You should be able to attach a document-level listener with a third parameter of true to capture the scroll events on all elements. Here's what that looks like:

document.addEventListener('scroll', function(e){ }, true); 

The true at the end is the important part, it tells the browser to capture the event on dispatch, even if that event does not normally bubble, like change, focus, and scroll.

Here's an example: http://jsbin.com/sayejefobe/1/edit?html,js,console,output