SharePoint 2010 Custom Application Page Scroll To Top On Postback

SharePoint 2010 is full of wonderful features that make developers' lives just a bit harder. I ran across an issue where validation was returning a message back to the screen, the page would display the page scrolled to the top and then immediately scroll down to the position to the location of the page prior to posting back. I have had previous run-ins with the s4-workspace, but nothing JavaScript related. I tried several avenues for solutions:

1. Setting the page directive attribute "MaintainScrollPosition" to be false
2. Registering a start up script: $(window).scrollTop(0)
3. Registering a start up script: $("#s4-workspace").scrollTop(0)
4. Attempted to register the the functions via a client script block to add a "pageLoaded" event

The short of it was that none of these worked. I decided to dive in to the HTML source and discovered a "_maintainWorkspaceScrollPosition" hidden field. This looked amazingly like the MaintainScrollPosition functionality, I thought I might be on the right path. The "Workspace" term jumped out at me since the SharePoint custom application page's content is in the s4-workspace; I started to get the feeling that this was a SharePoint feature. After searching all the files for the hidden field, I discovered it was only referenced in the SharePoint JavaScript files. Searching the internet did not yield any solutions on ways to disable the feature. So I generated a function that I would execute to scroll the page to the top.

function scrollToTop() {
    $(window).scrollTop(0);
    $("#s4-workspace").scrollTop(0);
    $("#_maintainWorkspaceScrollPosition").val(0);
}

The function above probably does more than required, but I don't control the Master Page and need to make sure the page can tolerate changes to Master Page style changes.

The server side needs to register a script to execute on the post back. This is a simple line that can be thrown about anywhere.

ScriptManager.RegisterStartupScript(this, this.Page.GetType(), "scrollToTop", "scrollToTop();", true)