jQuery UI dialog positioning

Question

I am trying to use the jQuery dialog UI library in order to position a dialog next to some text when it is hovered over. The jQuery dialog takes a position parameter which is measured from the top left corner of the current viewport (in other words, [0, 0] will always put it in the upper left hand corner of your browser window, regardless of where you are currently scrolled to). However, the only way I know to retrieve the location is of the element relative to the ENTIRE page.

The following is what I have currently. position.top is calculated to be something like 1200 or so, which puts the dialog well below the rest of the content on the page.

$(".mytext").mouseover(function() {
    position = $(this).position();
    $("#dialog").dialog('option', 'position', [position.top, position.left]);
}

How can I find the correct position?

Thanks!

Answer 1

instead of doing pure jquery, i would do:

$(".mytext").mouseover(function() {
    x= $(this).position().left - document.scrollleft
    y= $(this).position().top - document.scrolltop
    $("#dialog").dialog('option', 'position', [y, x]);
}

if i am understanding your question correctly, the code you have is positioning the dialog as if the page had no scroll, but you want it to take the scroll into account. my code should do that.

Answer 2

Check out some of the jQuery plugins for other implementations of a dialog. Cluetip appears to be a feature-rich tooltip/dialog style plug-in. The 4th demo sounds similar to what you are trying to do (although I see that it doesn't have the precise positioning option that you're looking for.)

Answer 3

This page shows how to determine your scroll offset. jQuery may have similar functionality but I couldn't find it. Using the getScrollXY function shown on the page, you should be able to subtract the x and y coords from the .position() results.

Answer 4

After reading all replies, this finally worked for me:

$(".mytext").mouseover(function() {
    var x = jQuery(this).position().left + jQuery(this).outerWidth();
    var y = jQuery(this).position().top - jQuery(document).scrollTop();
    jQuery("#dialog").dialog('option', 'position', [x,y]);
});

Answer 5

Taking Jaymin's example a step further, I came up with this for positioning a jQuery ui-dialog element above the element you've just clicked (think "speech bubble"):

$('#myDialog').dialog( 'open' );
var myDialog= $(this).position().left - $(this).outerWidth();
var myDialog= $(this).position().top - ( $(document).scrollTop() + $('.ui-dialog').outerHeight() );
$('#myDialog').dialog( 'option', 'position', [myDialogX, myDialogY] );

Note that I "open" the ui-dialog element before calculating the relative width and height offsets. This is because jQuery can't evaluate outerWidth() or outerHeight() without the ui-dialog element physically appearing in the page.

Just be sure to set 'modal' to false in your dialog options and you should be a-OK.

Answer 6

you can use $(this).offset(), position is related to the parent

Answer 7

a bit late but you can do this now by using $j(object).offset().left and .top accordingly.

Answer 8

As an alternative, you could use the jQuery UI Position utility e.g.

$(".mytext").mouseover(function() {
    var target = $(this);
    $("#dialog").dialog("widget").position({
       my: 'left',
       at: 'right',
       of: target
    });
}

Answer 9

I don't think the speech bubble is quite right. I tweaked it a bit so that it would work and the item opens right under the link.

function PositionDialog(link) {
    $('#myDialog').dialog('open');
    var myDialogX = $(link).position().left;
    var myDialogY = $(link).position().top + $(link).outerHeight();
    $('#myDialog').dialog('option', 'position', [myDialogX, myDialogY]);
}