How can you adjust the height of a jQuery UI accordion?

Question

In my UI I have an accordion setup like this:

<div id="object_list">     <h3>Section 1</h3>     <div>...content...</div>      // More sections </div> 

The accordion works properly when it is first formed, and it seems to adjust itself well for the content inside each of the sections. However, if I then add more content into the accordion after the .accordion() call (via ajax), the inner for the section ends up overflowing.

Since the accordion is being formed with almost no content, all the inner divs are extremely small, and thus the content overflows and you get accordions with scrollbars inside with almost no viewing area.

I have attempted to add min-height styles to the object_list div, and the content divs to no avail. Adding the min-height to the inner divs kind of worked, but it messed up the accordion's animations, and adding it to the object_list div did absolutely nothing.

How can I get a reasonable size out of the content sections even when there is not enough content to fill those sections?

Answer 1

autoHeight was deprecated in 1.9, and removed in 1.10.

Use:

$('#id').accordion({heightStyle: 'content'}); 

to auto size your inner div.

UPDATE:

I see that this is still quite an active post, so I decided to make sure my answer is still valid. It looks like this may no longer work in jQuery UI 1.11. It notes that the [content] property has been deprecated, and to use [panel] instead. Making the code snippet now look something more like this:

$('#id').accordion({heightStyle: 'panel'}); 

I HAVE NOT YET TESTED THIS, JUST FOUND, AND WILL RETURN AND REMOVE THIS COMMENT WHEN I HAVE TIME TO TEST

Answer 2

When you declare the accordion control div, you can put a height in the style tag for the div. Then you can set the fillSpace: true property to force the accordion control to fill that div space no matter what. This means you can set the height to whatever works best for you page. You could then change the height of the div when you add your code

If you want the accordion to dynamically resize to the content it contains as needed you can do the following trick posted on the jQuery UI website.

//getter var autoHeight = $( ".selector" ).accordion( "option", "autoHeight" ); //setter $( ".selector" ).accordion( "option", "autoHeight", false ); 

This means when you select an area with a lot of text, the accordion will recalculate it.