How to handle anchors (bookmarks) with Vue Router?

Question

I'm looking for a smart way to handle in-page anchors with Vue Router. Consider the following:

<router-link to="#app">Apply Now</router-link>
<!-- some HTML markup in between... -->
<div id="app">...</div>

The "scroll to anchor" behavior described in the docs works fine except:

• When you click on the anchor, it brings you down to the div id="app". Now scroll away from the div back to the anchor and try clicking it again -- this time you will not jump down to the div. In fact, the anchor will retain the class router-link-active and the URL will still contain the hash /#app;
• With the steps above, if you refresh the page (the URL will still contain the hash) and click on the anchor, nothing will happen either.

This is very unfortunate from the UX perspective because a potential customer has to manually scroll all the way down again to reach the application section.

I was wondering if Vue Router covers this situation. For reference, here's my router:

export default new VueRouter({
    routes,
    mode: 'history',
    scrollBehavior(to, from, savedPosition) {
        if (to.hash) {
            return { selector: to.hash }
        } else if (savedPosition) {
            return savedPosition;
        } else {
            return { x: 0, y: 0 }
        }
    }
})

Answer 1

I haven't found anything in the resources to solve your issue but you could utitlize the $route.hash in your mounted hook of the component that holds your <router-view></router-view> to solve the refresh issue.

<script>
export default {
  name: 'app',
  mounted: function()
  {
    // From testing, without a brief timeout, it won't work.
    setTimeout(() => this.scrollFix(this.$route.hash), 1);
  },
  methods: {
    scrollFix: function(hashbang)
    {
      location.hash = hashbang;
    }
  }
}
</script>

Then to solve the issue of second clicks you could use the native modifier and bind to your <router-link></router-link>. It's a fairly manual process but will work.

<router-link to="#scroll" @click.native="scrollFix('#scroll')">Scroll</router-link>

There may also be something you could do with the router's afterEach method but haven't figured that out yet.