Table - fixed header, scrollable body, most robust/simple solution? [duplicate]

Question

Possible Duplicate:
HTML table with fixed headers?

Looking for a solution to create a table with a scrollable body, and a static/fixed header.

Searching around seems to produce MANY flaky pieces of code, either not working in IE, requiring a huge amount of Javascript and tweaking, or a silly amount of CSS hacks etc.

To be honest, if it's a case of CSS hacks or Javascript, I think I'd prefer to go the Javascript option.

The alternative I guess is to place it all in a div, and just scroll the entire table - but that's a bit naff :D

Answer 1

I've just put together a jQuery plugin that does exactly what you want. Its very small in size and really easy to implement.

All that is required is a table that has a thead and tbody.

You can wrap that table in a DIV with a classname and the table will always resize to fit in that div. so for example if your div scales with the browser window so will the table. The header will be fixed when scrolling. The footer will be fixed (if you enable a footer). You also have the option to clone the header in the footer and have it fixed. Also if you make your browser window too small and all columns can't fit...it will also scroll horizontally (header too).

This plugin allows the browser to size the columns so they aren't fixed width columns.

you just pass the DIV's classname to the plugin like so: $('.myDiv').fixedHeaderTable({footer: true, footerId: 'myFooterId'}); and the plugin will do the rest. FooterID is a element on the page that contains the mark-up for your footer. this is used if you want to have pagination as your footer.

If you have multiple tables on the page it will also work for each table you want to have a fixed header.

check it out here: http://fixedheadertable.mmalek.com/

Keep in mind its still 'beta' so I am adding new features and bug fixes daily.

Supported browsers: IE6, IE7, IE8, FireFox, Safari, and Chrome

Here is a link to my response to another person who had the same question: Frozen table header inside scrollable div

Answer 2

<table style="width: 300px" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
<tr>
  <td>Column 1</td>
  <td>Column 2</td>
</tr>
</table>

<div style="overflow: auto;height: 100px; width: 320px;">
  <table style="width: 300px;" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
  <tr>
    <td>Value 1</td>
    <td>Value 2</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Value 1</td>
    <td>Value 2</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Value 1</td>
    <td>Value 2</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Value 1</td>
    <td>Value 2</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Value 1</td>
    <td>Value 2</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Value 1</td>
    <td>Value 2</td>
  </tr>
  </table>
</div>

This creates a fixed column header with the scrollable table below it. The trick is to embed the table you want to scroll in a tag with the overflow attribute set to auto. This will force the browser to display a scrollbar when the contents of the inner table are larger than the height of the surrounding .

The width of the outer must be larger than the width if the inner table to accommodate for the scrollbar. This may be difficult to get exactly right, because some users may have set their scrollbars to be wider or smaller than the default. However, with a difference of around 20 to 30 pixels you'll usually be able to display the scrollbar just fine.

CSS-Tricks also talks about using JavaScript and CSS to help with this as well so you can use highlighting. Here is the link to that article.