268
votes

enter image description here

Here's the code I'm using to achieve the above layout:

.header {
  height: 50px;
}

.body {
  position: absolute;
  top: 50px;
  right: 0;
  bottom: 0;
  left: 0;
  display: flex;
}

.sidebar {
  width: 140px;
}

.main {
  flex: 1;
  display: flex;
  flex-direction: column;
}

.content {
  flex: 1;
  display: flex;
}

.column {
  padding: 20px;
  border-right: 1px solid #999;
}
<div class="header">Main header</div>
<div class="body">
  <div class="sidebar">Sidebar</div>

  <div class="main">
    <div class="page-header">Page Header. Content columns are below.</div>
    <div class="content">
      <div class="column">Column 1</div>
      <div class="column">Column 1</div>
      <div class="column">Column 1</div>
    </div>
  </div>
</div>

I omitted the code used for styling. You can see all of it in the pen.


The above works, but when the content area's content overflows, it makes the whole page scroll. I only want the content area itself to scroll, so I added overflow: auto to the content div.

The problem with this now is that the columns themselves don't extend beyond their parents height, so the borders are cut off there too.

Here's the pen showing the scrolling issue.

How can I set the content area to scroll independently, while still having its children extend beyond the content box's height?

11

11 Answers

325
votes

I've spoken to Tab Atkins (author of the flexbox spec) about this, and this is what we came up with:

HTML:

<div class="content">
    <div class="box">
        <div class="column">Column 1</div>
        <div class="column">Column 2</div>
        <div class="column">Column 3</div>
    </div>
</div>

CSS:

.content {
    flex: 1;
    display: flex;
    overflow: auto;
}

.box {
    display: flex;
    min-height: min-content; /* needs vendor prefixes */
}

Here are the pens:

  1. Short columns being stretched.
  2. Longer columns overflowing and scrolling.

The reason this works is because align-items: stretch doesn't shrink its items if they have an intrinsic height, which is accomplished here by min-content.

158
votes

I just solved this problem very elegantly after a lot of trial and error.

Check out my blog post: http://geon.github.io/programming/2016/02/24/flexbox-full-page-web-app-layout

Basically, to make a flexbox cell scrollable, you have to make all its parents overflow: hidden;, or it will just ignore your overflow settings and make the parent larger instead.

75
votes

Working with position:absolute; along with flex:

Position the flex item with position: relative. Then inside of it, add another <div> element with:

position: absolute;
top: 0;
left: 0;
right: 0;
bottom: 0;

This extends the element to the boundaries of its relative-positioned parent, but does not allow to extend it. Inside, overflow: auto; will then work as expected.

  • the code snippet included in the answer - Click on enter image description here and then click on Full Page after running the snippet OR
  • Click here for the CODEPEN
  • The result: enter image description here

.all-0 {
  top: 0;
  bottom: 0;
  left: 0;
  right: 0;
}
p {
  text-align: justify;
}
.bottom-0 {
  bottom: 0;
}
.overflow-auto {
  overflow: auto;
}
<link href="https://maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/4.0.0-beta.2/css/bootstrap.min.css" rel="stylesheet"/>


<div class="p-5 w-100">
  <div class="row bg-dark m-0">
    <div class="col-sm-9 p-0 d-flex flex-wrap">
      <!-- LEFT-SIDE - ROW-1 -->
      <div class="row m-0 p-0">
        <!-- CARD 1 -->
        <div class="col-md-8 p-0 d-flex">
          <div class="my-card-content bg-white p-2 m-2 d-flex flex-column">
            <img class="img img-fluid" src="https://via.placeholder.com/700x250">
            <h4>Heading 1</h4>
            <p>
              Contrary to popular belief, Lorem Ipsum is not simply random text. It has roots in a piece of classical Latin literature from 45 BC, making it over 2000 years old...
          </div>
        </div>
        <!-- CARD 2 -->
        <div class="col-md-4 p-0 d-flex">
          <div class="my-card-content bg-white p-2 m-2 d-flex flex-column">
            <img class="img img-fluid" src="https://via.placeholder.com/400x250">
            <h4>Heading 1</h4>
            <p>
              Contrary to popular belief, Lorem Ipsum is not simply random text. It has roots in a piece of classical Latin literature from 45 BC, making it over 2000 years old...
          </div>
        </div>
      </div>
      <div class="row m-0">
        <!-- CARD 3 -->
        <div class="col-md-4 p-0 d-flex">
          <div class="my-card-content bg-white p-2 m-2 d-flex flex-column">
            <img class="img img-fluid" src="https://via.placeholder.com/400x250">
            <h4>Heading 1</h4>
            <p>
              Contrary to popular belief, Lorem Ipsum is not simply random text. It has roots in a piece of classical Latin literature from 45 BC, making it over 2000 years old...
          </div>
        </div>
        <!-- CARD 4 -->
        <div class="col-md-4 p-0 d-flex">
          <div class="my-card-content bg-white p-2 m-2 d-flex flex-column">
            <img class="img img-fluid" src="https://via.placeholder.com/400x250">
            <h4>Heading 1</h4>
            <p>
              Contrary to popular belief, Lorem Ipsum is not simply random text. It has roots in a piece of classical Latin literature from 45 BC, making it over 2000 years old...
          </div>
        </div>
        <!-- CARD 5-->
        <div class="col-md-4 p-0 d-flex">
          <div class="my-card-content bg-white p-2 m-2 d-flex flex-column">
            <img class="img img-fluid" src="https://via.placeholder.com/400x250">
            <h4>Heading 1</h4>
            <p>
              Contrary to popular belief, Lorem Ipsum is not simply random text. It has roots in a piece of classical Latin literature from 45 BC, making it over 2000 years old...
          </div>
        </div>
      </div>
    </div>
    <div class="col-sm-3 p-0">
      <div class="bg-white m-2 p-2 position-absolute all-0 d-flex flex-column">
        <h4>Social Sidebar...</h4>
        <hr />
        <div class="d-flex overflow-auto">
          <p>
            Topping candy tiramisu soufflé fruitcake ice cream chocolate bar. Bear claw ice cream chocolate bar donut sweet tart. Pudding cupcake danish apple pie apple pie. Halva fruitcake ice cream chocolate bar. Bear claw ice cream chocolate bar donut sweet tart.
            opping candy tiramisu soufflé fruitcake ice cream chocolate bar. Bear claw ice cream chocolate bar donut sweet tart. Pudding cupcake danish apple pie apple pie. Halva fruitcake ice cream chocolate bar. Bear claw ice cream chocolate bar donut sweet tart.
            opping candy tiramisu soufflé fruitcake ice cream chocolate bar. Bear claw ice cream chocolate bar donut sweet tart. Pudding cupcake danish apple pie apple pie. Halva fruitcake ice cream chocolate bar. Bear claw ice cream chocolate bar donut sweet tart.
            Pudding cupcake danish apple pie apple pie. Halvafruitcake ice cream chocolate bar. Bear claw ice cream chocolate bar donut sweet tart. Pudding cupcake danish apple pie apple pie. Halvafruitcake ice cream chocolate bar. Bear claw ice cream
            chocolate bar donut sweet tart. Pudding cupcake danish apple pie apple pie. Halvafruitcake ice cream chocolate bar. Bear claw ice cream chocolate bar donut sweet tart. Pudding cupcake danish apple pie apple pie. Halvafruitcake ice cream chocolate
            bar. Bear claw ice cream chocolate bar donut sweet tart. Pudding cupcake danish apple pie apple pie. Halva
        </div>
      </div>
    </div>
  </div>

Good Luck...

11
votes

A little late but this could help: http://webdesign.tutsplus.com/tutorials/how-to-make-responsive-scrollable-panels-with-flexbox--cms-23269

Basically you need to put html,body to height: 100%; and wrap all your content into a <div class="wrap"> <!-- content --> </div>

CSS:

html, body {
  height: 100%;
}

.wrap {
  height: 100vh;
  display: flex;
}

Worked for me. Hope it helps

10
votes

Add this:

align-items: flex-start;

to the rule for .content {}. That fixes it in your pen for me, at least (in both Firefox & Chrome).

By default, .content has align-items: stretch, which makes it size all of its auto-height children to match its own height, per http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-flexbox/#algo-stretch. In contrast, the value flex-start lets the children compute their own heights, and align themselves at its starting edge (and overflow, and trigger a scrollbar).

4
votes

The solution for this problem is just to add overflow: auto; to the .content for making the content wrapper scrollable.

Furthermore, there are circumstances occurring along with Flexbox wrapper and overflowed scrollable content like this codepen.

The solution is to add overflow: hidden (or auto); to the parent of the wrapper (set with overflow: auto;) around large contents.

4
votes

The following CSS changes in bold (plus a bunch of content in the columns to test scrolling) will work. Well, it makes each content column individually scrollable, which may be more (better?) than originally requested. Anyway, see the result in this Pen.

.content { flex: 1; display: flex; height: 1px; }

.column { padding: 20px; border-right: 1px solid #999; overflow: auto; }

The trick here seems to be that a scrollable panel needs to have a height literally set somewhere (in this case, via its parent), not just determined by flexbox. So even height: 1px works. The flex-grow:1 will still size the panel to fit properly.

3
votes

One issue that I've come across is that to have a scrollbar a n element needs a height to be specified (and not as a %).

The trick is to nest another set of divs within each column, and set the column parent's display to flex with flex-direction: column.

<style>
    html, body {
        height: 100%;
        margin: 0;
        padding: 0;
    }

    body {
        overflow-y: hidden;
        overflow-x: hidden;
        color: white;
    }

    .base-container {
        display: flex;
        flex: 1;
        flex-direction: column;
        width: 100%;
        height: 100%;
        overflow-y: hidden;
        align-items: stretch;
    }

    .title {
        flex: 0 0 50px;
        color: black;
    }

    .container {
        flex: 1 1 auto;
        display: flex;
        flex-direction: column;
    }

        .container .header {
            flex: 0 0 50px;
            background-color: red;
        }

        .container .body {
            flex: 1 1 auto;
            display: flex;
            flex-direction: row;
        }

            .container .body .left {
                display: flex;
                flex-direction: column;
                flex: 0 0 80px;
                background-color: blue;
            }
                .container .body .left .content,
                .container .body .main .content,
                .container .body .right .content {
                    flex: 1 1 auto;
                    overflow-y: auto;
                    height: 100px;
                }
                .container .body .main .content.noscrollbar {
                    overflow-y: hidden;
                }

            .container .body .main {
                display: flex;
                flex-direction: column;
                flex: 1 1 auto;
                background-color: green;
            }

            .container .body .right {
                display: flex;
                flex-direction: column;
                flex: 0 0 300px;
                background-color: yellow;
                color: black;
            }

    .test {
        margin: 5px 5px;
        border: 1px solid white;
        height: calc(100% - 10px);
    }
</style>

And here's the html:

<div class="base-container">
    <div class="title">
        Title
    </div>
    <div class="container">
        <div class="header">
            Header
        </div>
        <div class="body">
            <div class="left">
                <div class="content">
                    <ul>
                        <li>1</li>
                        <li>2</li>
                        <li>3</li>
                        <li>4</li>
                        <li>5</li>
                        <li>6</li>
                        <li>7</li>
                        <li>8</li>
                        <li>9</li>
                        <li>10</li>
                        <li>12</li>
                        <li>13</li>
                        <li>14</li>
                        <li>15</li>
                        <li>16</li>
                        <li>17</li>
                        <li>18</li>
                        <li>19</li>
                        <li>20</li>
                        <li>21</li>
                        <li>22</li>
                        <li>23</li>
                        <li>24</li>
                    </ul>
                </div>
            </div>
            <div class="main">
                <div class="content noscrollbar">
                    <div class="test">Test</div>
                </div>
            </div>
            <div class="right">
                <div class="content">
                    <div>Right</div>
                    <div>Right</div>
                    <div>Right</div>
                    <div>Right</div>
                    <div>Right</div>
                    <div>Right</div>
                    <div>Right</div>
                    <div>Right</div>
                    <div>Right</div>
                    <div>Right</div>
                    <div>Right</div>
                    <div>Right</div>
                    <div>Right</div>
                    <div>Right</div>
                    <div>Right</div>
                    <div>Right</div>
                    <div>Right</div>
                    <div>Right</div>
                    <div>Right</div>
                    <div>Right</div>
                    <div>Right</div>
                    <div>Right</div>
                    <div>Right</div>
                    <div>Right</div>
                    <div>Right</div>
                    <div>Right</div>
                    <div>Right</div>
                    <div>Right</div>
                    <div>Right</div>
                    <div>Right</div>
                    <div>Right</div>
                    <div>Right</div>
                    <div>Right</div>
                    <div>Right</div>
                    <div>Right</div>
                    <div>Right</div>
                    <div>Right</div>
                    <div>Right</div>
                    <div>Right</div>
                    <div>Right</div>
                    <div>Right</div>
                    <div>Right</div>
                    <div>Right</div>
                    <div>Right</div>
                    <div>Right</div>
                    <div>Right</div>
                    <div>Right</div>
                    <div>Right</div>
                    <div>Right</div>
                    <div>Right</div>
                    <div>Right</div>
                    <div>Right</div>
                    <div>Right</div>
                    <div>Right</div>
                    <div>End</div>
                </div>
            </div>
        </div>
    </div>
</div>

https://jsfiddle.net/LiamFlavelle/czpjdfr4/

2
votes
.list-wrap {
  width: 355px;
  height: 100%;
  position: relative;

  .list {
    position: absolute;
    top: 0;
    bottom: 0;
    overflow-y: auto;
    width: 100%;
  }
}
1
votes

You can simply put overflow property to "auto"

     .contain{
          background-color: #999999;
          margin: 5px; 
          padding: 10px 5px;
          width: 20%;
          height: 20%;
          overflow: auto;
      }              
       

contain is one of my flex-item class name

result :

scroll bar seen properly

0
votes

You can use a position: absolute inside a position: relative

https://codepen.io/Iquixe/pen/RwRzGrM