Trouble with simpletips and loading dynamic content

Question

Hi all,

I'm trying to use simpletip to generate dynamic tooltips from a database. I am working from this example, which works fine. It's using an image name (the image you hover over) as the key to pass to the PHP for querying the database.

$('.exampleselector').simpletip({
    content:'<img src=".." alt="loading" style="margin:10px;" />',
    onShow: function(){
        var param = this.getParent().find('img').attr('src');   
        this.load('tips.php',{img:param}); 
    } 
});

However, in my page I want to us the source div's id (the div that I'm hovering over) as the key and I can't seem to find a way to do it. i.e.

$(".myselector").simpletip({
    content:'<img src="..." alt="loading" style="margin:10px;" />',
    onShow: function(){
        var myvar = this.parent().attr("id");
        this.load('tips.php',{value:myvar}); 

I've looked around various forums to find the right way to get the div ID. I've tried various versions such as getParent().id , closest .... to no avail. I temporarily put in a window.alert to show the myvar result with all the options I tried. Most times I get nothing, the callback doesn't fire, a few times I just get myvar as undefined.

Can any advise the correct format please?

Many thanks

Tony