React Hooks Scroll to Element

Question

I am looking to write a React hook with React 16.8.6 that will let me scroll to a particular HTML element section on click of a navigation item. I have a Navigation component that is a sibling of the sections rendered on the page.

Also when the page scrolls, I would like to update state of the App with that HTML section.

Navigation Component JSX

<ul class="nav>
   <li><a>Section 1</a></li>
   <li><a>Section 2</a></li>          
</ul>

Sections in Home Page at App Level Component

<section className="section-1">Section 1</section>
<section className="section-2">Section 2</section>

Hooks

const [navItem, setNavItem] = React.useState(null);
const sectionRef = React.useRef(null);

// Scroll To Item
useEffect(() => {
    console.log(sectionRef.current);
    if (sectionRef.current) {
      sectionRef.current.scrollToItem();
    }
}, []);

Answer 1

If you don't mind using react-router-dom, then you can track history changes and update the scroll position to an HTML element's id via a hash history change. The advantage of this approach is you don't have to utilize state, nor utilize refs, and it can scale across the entire application (regardless of where the elements are located within the application's tree, you can scroll to them).

Working example:

https://fglet.codesandbox.io/ (demo)

https://codesandbox.io/s/fglet (source -- unfortunately, doesn't work within the codesandbox editor)

---

components/ScrollHandler (hook that listens to hash history changes, searches for elements that match the id located within the hash and, if it finds a matching element id, then it'll scroll to the element)

import { useEffect } from "react";
import PropTypes from "prop-types";
import { withRouter } from "react-router-dom";

const ScrollHandler = ({ location }) => {
  useEffect(() => {
    const element = document.getElementById(location.hash));

    setTimeout(() => {
      window.scrollTo({
        behavior: element ? "smooth" : "auto",
        top: element ? element.offsetTop : 0
      });
    }, 100);
  }, [location]);

  return null;
};

ScrollHandler.propTypes = {
  location: PropTypes.shape({
    pathname: PropTypes.string,
    search: PropTypes.string,
    hash: PropTypes.string,
    state: PropTypes.any,
    key: PropTypes.string
  }).isRequired
};

export default withRouter(ScrollHandler);

components/Navigation (links to change url hash history location)

import React from "react";
import { Link } from "react-router-dom";
import List from "../List";

const Navigation = () => (
  <List>
    {[1, 2, 3, 4, 5].map(num => (
      <li key={num}>
        <Link to={`/#section${num}`}>Section {num}</Link>
      </li>
    ))}
  </List>
);

export default Navigation;

components/Sections (the Headline component contains the id that will be matched against)

import React from "react";
import Headline from "../Headline";

const Sections = () =>
  [1, 2, 3, 4, 5].map(num => (
    <Headline key={num} id={`#section${num}`}>
      Section {num}
    </Headline>
  ));

export default Sections;

index.js

import React from "react";
import { render } from "react-dom";
import { BrowserRouter } from "react-router-dom";

import Container from "./components/Container";
import Navigation from "./components/Navigation";
import Sections from "./components/Sections";
import ScrollHandler from "./components/ScrollHandler";
import "./styles.css";

const App = () => (
  <BrowserRouter>
    <Container>
      <ScrollHandler />
      <Navigation />
      <Sections />
    </Container>
  </BrowserRouter>
);

render(<App />, document.getElementById("root"));