Preserving Scroll State on Tab Change in Angular

While working on a multi-tabbed Angular application, I encountered a challenge—how to preserve the scroll state as users switch between tabs. This feature was essential to enhance the user experience by ensuring users could pick up right where they left off when navigating between tabs. In this blog, I’ll walk you through how I added this feature to the project. It’s a simple yet effective way to maintain scroll positions for individual tabs. The Problem By default, switching between tabs often reloads the content, resetting the scroll position. This behavior can be frustrating for users, especially when navigating through long lists or data-intensive pages. To solve this, we need to: Save the scroll position of the current tab before switching. Restore the scroll position when the user returns to the tab. The Solution We can use window.scrollY to capture the current vertical scroll position and save it in a state object. When the user navigates back to a tab, we retrieve and restore the saved position. Here’s how to implement it step by step: 1. Setup Scroll State Management Create a property to track the scroll positions for each tab. export class TabComponent { activeTab: string = 'tab1'; tabScrollStates: { [key: string]: number } = {}; onTabChange(newTab: string): void { // Save the current scroll position for the active tab this.tabScrollStates[this.activeTab] = window.scrollY || 0; // Update the active tab this.activeTab = newTab; // Restore the scroll position for the new tab const savedScrollPosition = this.tabScrollStates[newTab] || 0; // Delay scroll restoration to ensure the DOM has updated with the new tab content setTimeout(() => { window.scrollTo(0, savedScrollPosition); }, 0); } } 2. Connect the Tabs to the Logic In your template, bind the onTabChange method to the tab selection event. Tab 1 Tab 2 Content for Tab 1 Content for Tab 2 3. Optional Enhancements Debouncing: If users switch tabs rapidly, debouncing can prevent multiple save operations within a short time frame, reducing performance overhead and ensuring consistent behavior Horizontal Scroll: Use window.scrollX for horizontal scroll preservation. const savedHorizontalScroll = window.scrollX || 0; setTimeout(() => { window.scrollTo(savedHorizontalScroll, savedScrollPosition); }, 0); Conclusion By managing scroll positions effectively, you can greatly improve the user experience of your Angular applications. This solution is simple, lightweight, and can be easily extended for more complex scenarios. Have you implemented similar scroll management techniques? Share your insights and improvements in the comments below! Happy coding!

export class TabComponent {
  activeTab: string = 'tab1';
  tabScrollStates: { [key: string]: number } = {};

  onTabChange(newTab: string): void {
    // Save the current scroll position for the active tab
    this.tabScrollStates[this.activeTab] = window.scrollY || 0;

    // Update the active tab
    this.activeTab = newTab;

    // Restore the scroll position for the new tab
    const savedScrollPosition = this.tabScrollStates[newTab] || 0;
    // Delay scroll restoration to ensure the DOM has updated with the new tab content
    setTimeout(() => {
      window.scrollTo(0, savedScrollPosition);
    }, 0);
  }
}

   (click)="onTabChange('tab1')">Tab 1
   (click)="onTabChange('tab2')">Tab 2


 *ngIf="activeTab === 'tab1'">
  
Content for Tab 1