How can I differentiate a manual scroll (via mousewheel/scrollbar) from a Javascript/jQuery scroll?

David Murdoch picture David Murdoch · May 14, 2010 · Viewed 15.2k times · Source

UPDATE:

Here is a jsbin example demonstrating the problem.

UPDATE 2:
And here is the fixed version thanks to fudgey.


Basically, I have the following javascript which scrolls the window to an anchor on the page:

 // get anchors with href's that start with "#"
 $("a[href^=#]").live("click", function(){
     var target = $($(this).attr("href"));
     // if the target exists: scroll to it...
     if(target[0]){
         // If the page isn't long enough to scroll to the target's position
         // we want to scroll as much as we can. This part prevents a sudden 
         // stop when window.scrollTop reaches its maximum.
         var y = Math.min(target.offset().top, $(document).height() - $(window).height());
         // also, don't try to scroll to a negative value...
         y=Math.max(y,0);
         // OK, you can scroll now...
         $("html,body").stop().animate({ "scrollTop": y }, 1000);
     }
     return false;
 });

It works perfectly......until I manually try to scroll the window. When the scrollbar or mousewheel is scrolled I need to stop the current scroll animation...but I'm not sure how to do this.

This is probably my starting point...

$(window).scroll(e){
    if(IsManuallyScrolled(e)){
        $("html,body").stop();
    }
} 

...but I'm not sure how to code the IsManuallyScrolled function. I've checked out e (the event object) in Google Chrome's console and AFAIK there is not way to differentiate between a manual scroll and jQuery's animate() scroll.

How can I differentiate between a manual scroll and one called via jQuery's $.fn.animate function?

Answer

Mottie picture Mottie · May 14, 2010

Try this function:

$('body,html').bind('scroll mousedown wheel DOMMouseScroll mousewheel keyup', function(e){
 if ( e.which > 0 || e.type == "mousedown" || e.type == "mousewheel"){
  $("html,body").stop();
 }
})

Also, did you see this tutorial?

Update: Modern browsers now use "wheel" as the event, so I've included it in the code above.