Wednesday 14 September 2016

Extend column tooltip to table cell

Quite sometime ago while still on 3.x I described a simple way to add tooltips in a report using standard HTML in a HTML Expression.
<span title="#RECENT_NOTE#">#MY_COLUMN#</span>

However, it will only appear when hovering over the span content, not anywhere within the table cell.

To do so we can add a dynamic action to execute some JavaScript after refresh of the relevant region.
$('td[headers=my_column] span').each( // for every data cell in the column
  function() { 
     // copy the title attribute to the parent cell
$(this).parent().attr('title',  $(this).attr('title'));
  });
This JavaScript copies the title attribute from the inner span to the surrounding td tag, so you will see the tooltip when the cursor is anywhere within the cell. I find this relevant when there is a bit of spacing/padding in the report.

In this follow-up post I describe how you could display this tooltip on tap of the cell, useful when used within touch devices.

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