Disable scrolling when changing focus form elements ipad web app

Question

I have a web app. I'm trying to disable/prevent the scrolling that occurs when you focus on different form inputs (i.e. the scrolling that occurs as you advance through input elements in a form).

I've already disabled scrolling with this:

 <script type="text/javascript">
     $(document).ready(function() {
         document.ontouchmove = function(e){
              e.preventDefault();
              }
     });
 </script>

To add a little more info - I have a few "slides" that my page consists of. Each are 768x1024 and they are "stacked" on the page (i.e. the page is 768x3072 [1024*3=3072]) and when you click a link I'm using scrollTo jquery plugin to scroll to the next "slide" and .focus() on an input element.

Does anyone know how to do this?

Answer 1

I've found that in UIWebView, document.body is also sometimes moved. So I use:

    input.onfocus = function () {
        window.scrollTo(0, 0);
        document.body.scrollTop = 0;
    }

Answer 2

Ooops, the window.scrollTo suggested is kinda lousy and make things unpredictable.

Try this better solution:

jQuery('body').bind('focusin focus', function(e){
  e.preventDefault();
})

Or, just hook your input:

jQuery('input.your-input-class').bind('focusin focus', function(e){
  e.preventDefault();
})

Why? Browsers may scroll the focused form element into view by default on 'focusin' event fired (Firefox has a bug, so hook on focus instead). So, just tell them don't do that explicitly.

BTW, if the focus event is triggered by element.focus() in your code, then even the upon solution would not be functional.

So, a solution to that would be replace you focus trigger to select, i.e.

element.select()

other than element.focus()

If you don't like the element.select() approach since it will select the text inside the input element, then try to create a Range object of the input element text and collapse it if you will, sorry for no time to try that at this moment.

Answer 3

To prevent the browser from scrolling to the element you move focus to I use jQuerys one event listener. Right before I move the focus to the element we add the listener to the scroll event and counter scroll. The event listener is than removed by jQuery.

var oldScroll = $(window).scrollTop();

$( window ).one('scroll', function() {
    $(window).scrollTop( oldScroll ); //disable scroll just once
});

$('.js-your-element').focus();

This way seems simple, effective to me and works great in all tests I have done.

Hope it helps someone.

Answer 4

If you do not want the input to be editable the answer from kpozin works fine. But as soon as you remove the readonly attribute onfocus or onclick the input field scrolls in focus again.

What really helps and does not impact focus or ability to enter text is adding onFocus="window.scrollTo(0, 0);" to the input elements.

Of course you have to guarantee that the relevant input is not covered by the onscreen keyboard!

See also this post: Preventing an <input> element from scrolling the screen on iPhone?

Answer 5

Update on this - I've seen the window.scroll(0,0) solution in a couple of different places but it seemed to just make it worse. I have multiple inline text inputs on my page so when moving focus between them the automatic up and down scrolling in Safari made the page almost unusable, especially in landscape orientation.

After fighting iOS 8 for a week on this I found this stops the scrolling. This works when changing focus from one element to another as you need to attach the onblur event to something:

var moveFocus = function (blurId, focusId) {
    var blurInput = document.getElementById(blurId);
    var focusInput = document.getElementById(focusId);
    if (blurInput && focusInput) {
        blurInput.onblur = function () {
            if (focusInput.setSelectionRange && focusInput.setSelectionRange()) {
                var len = focusInput.value.length;
                focusInput.setSelectionRange(len, len);
            }
            focusInput.focus();
        };
        focusInput.focus();
    };
};

Answer 6

For whatever reason, it appears you can mitigate this by applying a keyframe animation to an autoFocused input container.

function App() {
  const [isSearching, setIsSearching] = useState(false);

  return (
    <FixedContainer>
      {isSearching && (
        <Box>
          <Input autoFocus type="text" placeholder="click me" onBlur={() => setIsSearching(false)} />
        </Box>
      )}
    </FixedContainer>
  )
}

const fadeInKeyframes = keyframes`
  0% {
    opacity: 0;
  }
  100% {
    opacity: 1;
  }
`;

const Box = styled.div`
  animation-name: ${fadeInKeyframes};
  animation-duration: 0.1s;
  animation-timing-function: ease;
  animation-delay: 0s;
  animation-iteration-count: 1;
  animation-direction: normal;
  animation-fill-mode: forwards;
  animation-play-state: running;
`;

https://stackblitz.com/edit/react-ios-input-scroll

Working example: https://react-ios-input-scroll.stackblitz.io

Answer 7

This worked for me (using jQuery). It allows the scroll and then returns you to the proper position when you leave the input.

    var saveScrollLeft;
    $("input, textarea")
        .focus(function () {
            clearTimeout(blurTimeoutId);
            saveScrollLeft = $("body").scrollLeft();
            })
        .blur(function () {
            // The user might be moving from one input to another, so we don't want to quickly scroll on blur.  Wait a second and see if they are off all inputs.
            blurTimeoutId = setTimeout(function () {
                $(window).scrollLeft(saveScrollLeft);
                }, 1000);
        });

Answer 8

None of the provided solutions worked for me. Since the form that is grabbing the focus (and scrolling page initial display to said form) is below the fold, I simply added a fade-in to the form.

So I add a class name called fade-in, which corresponding css to display:none

using jQuery I then simply do jQuery(".fade-in").fadeIn(); after document ready, and the issue is gone.

This is obviously not limited to using jQuery. Vanilla js can be used for the fade.

Answer 9

In case you are developing a mobile webapp with cordova, there is a plugin for that:

The plugin that solved the problem for me was the Telerik Keyboard Plugin. It is using the basic UIWebView. Install the plugin

cordova plugin add ionic-plugin-keyboard

And call this command after your app loaded:

cordova.plugins.Keyboard.disableScroll(true);

In case you are using the WKWebView, you can use e.g. this plugin

Answer 10

To "focus" without any scroll, you may use select. select by default will select all of the text inside an input. To mimic focus behavior and have the caret at the end of the input you can use:

var myInput = document.getElementById('my-input');
var length = myInput.value.length;  // Or determine the value of length any other way
myInput.select();
myInput.setSelectionRange(length, length);

Answer 11

If you use element.focus(), change it to element.focus({ preventScroll: true }).

But I'm not sure if it is working on Safari: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLOrForeignElement/focus

Answer 12

Try this answer by BLSully. Give all your input elements a readonly="readonly" attribute initially. This will prevent Mobile Safari from scrolling to it. Remove the attribute on focus and add it again on blur for each element.