Freeze TH header and scrolling data

Question

I have a html table and I want to freeze the header row th tag for scrolling the data. How I can do that? Does I need to use the Dom? Thanks !!

Answer 1

My solution is to use two tables and fix the column widths. The lower table is in a scrollable div and has no header.

Answer 2

I've done it in the past using CSS by defining a height for the <TBODY> tag on my table, and using overflow:auto. This was a while ago, and I think there were some compatability problems. I don't remember precisely what they were, but this solution may work for your problem.

Answer 3

Have you looked a the jQuery grid?

http://trirand.com/jqgrid/jqgrid.html

Answer 4

the best solution (the one that scales with lots of data) is to use 2 tables like aaron said, the top table has the headers, and the bottom table should have the headers as the last row (or the footer), but with opacity of 0, so that you cannot see them.

This the headers at the bottom make the bottom table have the same column widths as the top table, making things line up. make sure you style both header and footer the same.

you will also have to create a seperate scroll bar for vertical scrolling to the right of the table, because otherwise the scroll bar will mess up your widths. add a scroll event listener to set the scrolltop of the table to the scrolltop of the scrollbar, and resize the scroll bar to be the same height as the table.

its pretty easy, actually =)

Answer 5

If you take Accessibility seriously, two tables is not the way to go since it breaks rules.

There are ways to do it in pure CSS, but it is a headache to get it to work in all browsers. There are a few examples out on the net, but they do not all work 100% with IE without tweaks.

I am currently working on a CSS only version, this is getting pretty close: http://www.coderanch.com/t/431995/HTML-JavaScript/Table-with-fixed-header-scolling#1918825

Does not work in IE8rc1 yet, IE6/7 has a border issue and you have to live with the scrollbar looking different in FF vs IE.

Answer 6

With FireFox, you can put style="height: 200px; overflow-y: auto" But to have a pure CSS version compatible with all major browsers, I've use this example since IE doesn't support syles in tbody or thead.

Answer 7

Create a single table as you normally would to meet accessibility concerns. Dynamically create a new table based on the thead using jQuery (copy the thead) and inject it into the page above the first table and give it the fixed position. It should stay in place while the rest of the table scrolls, but it will still remain accessible and work with JavaScript disabled.

Answer 8

I have come up with a solution that sort of combines two previously mentioned ones. It uses jQuery and two tables , one for the header and one for the content. The header table is set to a width of 100% with no column widths set. At the bottom of the content table there is a row defined to match the header table with the column widths set. This row is hidden so that it is not shown, but retains the column widths.

For this example I gave my header row an ID of 'Header1' and the bottom row and ID of 'Header2'. Also I wrapped the content table inside a div with an ID of 'scrollTable'.

I set styles in my CSS file for the scrollTable ID, see below:

    #scrollTable {
 height:250px;
 overflow-x:hidden;
 overflow-y:scroll;
    }

Now for the jQuery part. Basically what I'm doing here is taking the widths of the bottom row columns and setting the header columns to match. I stretch the width of the last column of the header so that it fits over the top of the scroll bar. See code below:

   $(document).ready(function(){
 var maxWidth = $('#Header1').width();    // Get max row Width
 $('#Header2 th').each(function(i) {     // Set col headers widths to to match col widths 
      var width = $(this).width();
      $('#Header1 th').eq(i).width(width);
 });

 var blankSpace = maxWidth - $('#Header1').width();               // Calculate extra space
 $('#Header1 th:last').width( $('#Header1 th:last').width() + blankSpace );  // Stretch last header column to fill remaining space

});

I have tested this successfully on IE 6, 7 & 8, Firefox 3.0.1.4, Chrome 3.0.195.25, Opera 10, and Safari 3.2.2 on Windows XP.

Answer 9

Have you tried this plugin from JQuery ? http://plugins.jquery.com/project/floatobject I believe this does what you want. Check out the demo @ amirharel.com/labs/fo/float_demo.html Cheers!

Answer 10

Thank you Very much the soultion is working

Answer 11

Hi Zulucap, your solution and almost all the above solutions don't work when you have a table which is horisontally scrollable. Please let me know if you have any solution to freeze header when table is vertically and horisontally scrollable,

regards