This has been asked a zillion times: here, there, and the other place just on SO. Yet there's no real good answer that I can find.
<recap> Often I have tables that are vertically much deeper than the viewport. I'd like to be able to scroll the table's <tbody>
while its <thead>
remains fixed and visible. Some of these tables are also much wider than the viewport. Here I want the table's <thead>
to scroll horizontally.
To get the effect, I have dozens of lines of JS, including setInterval( )
calls to check scrollLeft
and scrollTop
, so that I can reposition a copy of <thead>
1. It works but it's a huge, ungainly, frail and unmaintainable pain in the ass.</recap>
Question: Is there some straightforward css3 way, existent or emerging or proposed, that I can use to get a a table's <thead>
and <tbody>
to scroll horizontally and vertically, yet independently of each other?
Thanks!
1 Why setInterval( )
? Because IE doesn't uniformly deliver onScroll
events, you silly; everybody knows that!
a dirty way would be to put the header table in a separate div like:
<div class="header">
<table>
<thead><tr><td>#</td><td>v</td></tr></thead>
</table>
</div>
Then body in the another div like:
<div class="body">
<table>
<tbody>
<tr><td>1</td><td>a</td></tr>
<tr><td>1</td><td>a</td></tr>
<tr><td>1</td><td>a</td></tr>
<tr><td>1</td><td>a</td></tr>
<tr><td>1</td><td>a</td></tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</div>
Now you can give a fixed height to body div
and set oveflow
to auto
. like:
table{border:0px solid #ccc;height:30px;}
table tr td{border:1px solid #ccc;padding:5px;}
div.body{height:70px;overflow:auto;border-bottom:1px solid #ccc;}
here is a working example I did in jsfiddle
I ended up modeling the "solution" on the suggestion of @Naveed Ahmad. I put the data part of the table in a <tbody>; and made a fake <thead> that I filled in at onLoad time by referring to the widths and offsets of the <td>s in the first table row, like this:
function position_col_heads ( ) {
// get all the TD child elements from the first row
var tds = main_tbody.children[0].getElementsByTagName('TD');
for ( var i = 0; i < tds.length; ++i ) {
thead.children[i].style.left =
parseFloat( tds[i].offsetLeft ) + 'px';
thead.children[i].style.width =
parseFloat( tds[i].scrollWidth ) + 'px';
}
}
This works more or less OK on this page.