70

I'm aware of this question, but none of the answers work in Safari, Chrome, etc.

The accepted strategy (as demonstrated here) is to set the tbody height and overflow properties like so:

<table>
    <thead>
        <tr><th>This is the header and doesn't scroll</th></tr>
    </thead>
    <tbody style="height:100px; overflow:auto;">
        <tr><td>content that scrolls</td></tr>
        <tr><td>content that scrolls</td></tr>
        <tr><td>content that scrolls</td></tr>
        <tr><td>content that scrolls</td></tr>
        <tr><td>content that scrolls</td></tr>
        <tr><td>content that scrolls</td></tr>
        <tr><td>content that scrolls</td></tr>
    </tbody>
</table>

Unfortunately, this does not work in any webkit browsers. There is a bug report about it that doesn't seem to be a high priority (reported June 05).

So my question is: are there alternate strategies that do actually work? I've tried the two-table approach, but it's impossible to guarantee that the header will line up with the content. Do I just have to wait for Webkit to fix it?

Community
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Andrew Ensley
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14 Answers14

32

Here is a working example:

http://www.imaputz.com/cssStuff/bigFourVersion.html

You have to add the display:block to the thead > tr and tbody

Michael Koper
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  • @CristianBoariu it doesn't? :( – Andreas Wong Apr 08 '12 at 16:51
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    @Michael Koper I really like this. unfortunately it doesn't work on IE9 :( – Mo. Apr 10 '12 at 15:30
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    This completely fails on IE 9, the solution is inacceptible like that imho. There is no fallback, on IE it shows no table lines at all! – John May 10 '12 at 18:31
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    This only works if each cell is the same, set length. Is it possible to have this work with flexible tables? – streetlight May 21 '13 at 14:58
  • [@TJVanToll's answer](http://stackoverflow.com/a/13328050/165673) adds IE fallbacks to this – Yarin Dec 30 '13 at 17:59
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    This is not a solution. The whole _point_ of tables is to have columns that dynamically align w/ the data points displayed within the table. Setting a fixed width on a header will eventually only lead to a mis-aligned table. The struggle to properly display tabular data in a browser marches on... *sigh* – RavenHursT Feb 18 '14 at 21:00
  • This solution has an issue. If the text which include in a cell is wider than the cell, Pattern goes out. I have a real solution. please check my answer. – Salitha Prasad Aug 14 '16 at 13:06
17

Using the display:block style only works if you have 1 column. If you have multiple data columns - with multiple fields - then display:block appears to make all data columns scrollable but under the 1st column (does the same in Firefox - which is the only browser I know that does tbody scrolling nicely). Incidentally, on Firefox - you can use the overflow-x: hidden style to suppress the horizontal scroll.

I realized that the issue I mention only occurs if you are not specifying a width for the th & td elements - if you can fix the column widths then it works. Problem for me is I can't fix the column widths.

12

Try the first method of this page, pure CSS with a single table (2 divs around the table, and the thead is positionned absolute) : http://www.cssplay.co.uk/menu/tablescroll.html Seems to work on FF4/IE9/IE8 in addition to IE7/FF3.6.

lsf
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5

I had the same issue and wrote a jQuery script to do this for me... uses two table elements and formats the css accordingly. Hope this helps others who have the same issue...

http://jsfiddle.net/pe295/1/

Sean Haddy
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5

I saw Sean Haddy's excellent solution and took the liberty of making some edits:

  • Use classes instead of ID, so one jQuery script could be reused for multiple tables on one page
  • Added support for semantic HTML table elements like caption, thead, tfoot, and tbody
  • Made scrollbar optional so it won't appear for tables that are "shorter" than the scrollable height
  • Adjusted scrolling div's width to bring the scrollbar up to the right edge of the table
  • Made concept accessible by
    • using aria-hidden="true" on injected static table header
    • and leaving original thead in place, just hidden with jQuery and set aria-hidden="false"
  • Showed examples of multiple tables with different sizes

Sean did the heavy lifting, though. Thanks to Matt Burland, too, for pointing out need to support tfoot.

Please see for yourself at http://jsfiddle.net/jhfrench/eNP2N/

Community
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Jeromy French
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3

A faced the same problem long ago, and I finally set out the two tables approach. This is the result: http://jsfiddle.net/bGr4V/3/, it works for all browsers (IE6+ incl).

In this jsFiddle you can play with a clean version.

My solution was to add a fix cell <th class="fix"> </th> in thead to fill the space of the scroll bar in the tbody, then give one column a variable width (<td class="grow">), so the header fix cell wouldn't unmatch on resizing.

HTML:

<div class="fixed_table">
  <div class="head">
    <table>
      <thead>
        <tr>
          <th>Column header</th>
          <th class="grow">Column header</th>
          <th class="fix"> </th>
        </tr>
      </thead>
    </table>
  <div class="body">
    <table class="full_table">
      <caption class="caption">Caption</caption>
      <tbody>
        <tr>
          <td>Data</td>
          <td class="grow">Data</td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
          <td>...</td>
          <td>...</td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
          <td>...</td>
          <td>...</td>
        </tr>
      </tbody>
    </table>
  </div>
</div>

CSS: has * and _ hack for ie6-7, and a -webkit specific for the header fix-cell matching scroll width in each case.

.fixed_table table {
  table-layout: fixed;
  width: auto;
  border-width: 0;
  padding: 0;
  border-collapse: collapse;
}

.fixed_table .body {
  overflow: scroll;
  overflow-x: hidden;
  max-height: 10.75em;
  min-height: 2.5em;
  padding-bottom: 0.8em;
  *padding-right: 17px; /*ie7 & ie6*/
  _padding-right: 0; /*ie6*/
  _height: 10em ;
}

.fixed_table th, .fixed_table td {
  width: 4.7em;
}

.fixed_table .grow {
  width: auto;
}

.fixed_table .fix {
  width: 16px;
  *width: 17px; /*ie7 & ie6*/
  _width: 16px; /*ie6*/
}

/* webkit specific */
@media screen and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio:0) {
  .fixed_table .fix{ width: 17px }
}
I.G. Pascual
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2

Thought I'd throw my solution into the mix - http://tjvantoll.com/2012/11/10/creating-cross-browser-scrollable-tbody/.

It takes the same basic route as @Michael Koper's solution but includes a workaround so the table will look correct in IE back to IE6.

I solve the width issue by giving the <table> a table-layout: fixed and explicitly assigning width to cells in each column. Not ideal but it does produce a semantic table that will align cross browser regardless of whether a scrollbar is needed.

Demo: http://codepen.io/tjvantoll/pen/JEKIu

TJ VanToll
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1

It may be overkill for this question, but YUI still provides possibly the best free cross-browser datatable. It can be used for read-only data as well.

YUI 2 DataTable

YUI 3 DataTable

Click on the examples there to see scrollable samples. Since, I am a newbie to stackoverflow, I can only post these two links.

Tim Penner
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user2030366
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1

I developed javascript solution for the above problem
which works only in Firefox 7+ as i have tested only in FF

I came to this thread and found solution pointed by Michael Koper

In this solution three important things are done
1) fix the column width
2) thead > tr display is set to block
3) tbody display is set to block

as others have mentioned there problem to fix the width , i am also in same position;
even i cant fix the width statically

so i thought i will fix the width dynamically ( after table is rendered in browser) and this did the trick :)

following is the solution in javascript which works only in FF
( i have tested only in FF , i dont have access to other browsers ) 

       function test1(){                
            var tbodys = document.getElementsByTagName("TBODY");
            for(var i=0;i<tbodys.length;i++){
                do_tbodyscroll(tbodys[i]);
            }
        }


      function do_tbodyscroll(_tbody){
            // get the table node 
            var table = _tbody.parentNode;

            // first row of tbody 
            var _fr = _tbody.getElementsByTagName("TR")[0];

            // first row cells .. 
            var _frcells = _fr.cells;

            // Width array , width of each element is stored in this array 
            var widtharray = new Array(_frcells.length);

            for(var i=0;i<_frcells.length;i++){                    
                widtharray[i] = _frcells[i].scrollWidth;
            }                

            // Apply width to first row                  
            for(var i=0;i<_frcells.length;i++){
                _frcells[i].width = widtharray[i];                   
            }                 

            // Get the Last row in Thead ... 
            // COLGROUPS USING COLSPAN NOT YET SUPPORTED

            var thead = table.getElementsByTagName("THEAD")[0];
            var _rows = thead.getElementsByTagName("TR");
            var tableheader = _rows[_rows.length - 1];
            var headercells = tableheader.cells;

            // Apply width to header ..                                
            for(var i=0;i<headercells.length;i++){
                headercells[i].width = widtharray[i];
            }

            // ADD 16 Pixel of scroll bar to last column ..
            headercells[headercells.length -1 ].width = widtharray[headercells.length -1] + 16;

            tableheader.style.display = "block";
            _tbody.style.display = "block";  
        }

This solutions finds out what is the width of column from browser
and set again the same width to columns ( header and first row of tbody )
after the width is set; thead > tr and tbody display is set to block

Hope this solution is useful for all of you ..
if you can extend it to other browsers please reply to this post

Stephen
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Digambar Sangavkar
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1

This is really quite hacky but maybe it will help someone somewhere...

http://jsfiddle.net/yUHCq/1/

It uses columns instead of rows so processing it would essentially be done backwards.

Transitional DOCTYPE added for IE compatibility.

Matthew
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    Do people get sent to CSS hell for this sort of thing? – Matthew Feb 08 '12 at 22:19
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    That's not a `` element, let alone a table element, and hence do not answer the question (the title leaves little place for imagination). – Rob W Feb 08 '12 at 22:24
0

Add display:block; This will also remove the unnecessary horizontal scroll in FireFox as well. You are also, no doubt, aware that neither example works in MSIE 8.

<table>
    <thead>
        <tr><th>This is the header and doesn't scroll</th></tr>
    </thead>
    <tbody style="height:100px; overflow:auto;display:block;">
        <tr><td>content that scrolls</td></tr>
        <tr><td>content that scrolls</td></tr>
        <tr><td>content that scrolls</td></tr>
        <tr><td>content that scrolls</td></tr>
        <tr><td>content that scrolls</td></tr>
        <tr><td>content that scrolls</td></tr>
        <tr><td>content that scrolls</td></tr>
    </tbody>
</table>
mmcglynn
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    Multiple columns are not part of the example given in the question. – mmcglynn Aug 29 '11 at 19:44
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    @mmcglynn: While that might be true, the only reason to want to do this in the first place is for a multi-column table so this is a fair assumption. Don't take all questions at face-value. – Matti Virkkunen Apr 30 '14 at 11:52
  • Sure, in the future I'll add markup that isn't in the example and cross reference with your interpretation of the question. – mmcglynn Apr 30 '14 at 17:13
0

There is an example here that works in IE5+, Firefox and Chrome. However, it uses fixed width columns. http://www.cssplay.co.uk/menu/tablescroll.html

user1491819
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0

If anyone needs it to work in IE quirks mode, here is how I changed and simplified I.G. Pascual's code to work:

.fixed_table{
       overflow: scroll;
       overflow-x: hidden;
       max-height: 300px;
       height: 300px;
       min-height: 50px;
       padding-right:0;
}
#datatable td 
{
       padding:3px;
       text-align: center;
       width: 9%;
       vertical-align: middle;
       background-color: #343435; 
       color: #E0E0E3;
       overflow:hidden;
} 
<div class="head">
    <table>
        <thead>
            <tr>
                <th>Time (GMT)</th>
                <th>Price</th>
            </tr>
        </thead>
    </table>
</div>
<div class="fixed_table">
    <table id="datatable" cellspacing="1" cellpadding="1">
        <tbody></tbody>
    </table>
</div>
Ronen Festinger
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0

Let the table draw as it's way and calculate each column's width and set it in to each heading. Headings are made with divisions and then we can let the table to be scrolled free.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<style>
.t_heading{
  margin-top: 20px;
  font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;
  background-color: #4CAF50;
}

.heading{
  background-color: #4CAF50;
  color: white;
  float:left;
  padding: 8px 0PX 8PX 0PX;
  border-bottom: 1px solid #ddd;
  height: 20px;
  text-align: left;
}

.t_data{
  overflow-y: scroll;
  overflow-x: hidden;
  height:0px;
  width: 100%;

}

.t_content{
    border-collapse: collapse;
    font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;
    width: 100%;
}

.column1,.column2,.column3,.column4{
    padding: 8px 0PX 8PX 0PX;
    text-align: left;
    border-bottom: 1px solid #ddd;
}
.t_row:hover{
  background-color:#f5f5f5;
}
</style>
<script>
function setBody(){
    var body = document.body,
    html = document.documentElement;

    var height = Math.max( body.scrollHeight, body.offsetHeight, html.clientHeight, html.scrollHeight, html.offsetHeight );
    height = height-300;
    /*
     ** By changing the subtraction value, You can fit the table in to the screen correctly.
     ** Make sure not to come the hscroll.
     ** Or you can set fixed height with css for the div as your wish.
     */
    document.getElementById("t_data").style.height = height+"px";

    setColumnWidth("column1");
    setColumnWidth("column2");
    setColumnWidth("column3");
    setColumnWidth("column4");
}

function setColumnWidth(o){
        var object = o;
        var x = document.getElementsByClassName(object);
        var y = x[0].clientWidth;
        document.getElementById(object).style.width = y+"px";
 }
</script>
</head>

<body onload="setBody()">
<div class="t_heading">
<div class="heading"  id="column1">Heading 1</div>
<div class="heading"  id="column2">Heading 2</div>
<div class="heading"  id="column3">Heading 3</div>
<div class="heading"  id="column4">Heading 4</div>
</div>
<div class="t_data" id="t_data">
<table class="t_content">
    <tr class='t_row'>
        <td class='column1'>Column1 Row 0</td>
        <td class='column2'>Column2 Row 0</td>
        <td class='column3'>Column3 Row 0</td>
        <td class='column4'>Column4 Row 0</td>
    </tr><tr class='t_row'>
        <td class='column1'>Column1 Row 1</td>
        <td class='column2'>Column2 Row 1</td>
        <td class='column3'>Column3 Row 1</td>
        <td class='column4'>Column4 Row 1</td>
    </tr><tr class='t_row'>
        <td class='column1'>Column1 Row 2</td>
        <td class='column2'>Column2 Row 2</td>
        <td class='column3'>Column3 Row 2</td>
        <td class='column4'>Column4 Row 2</td>
    </tr><tr class='t_row'>
        <td class='column1'>Column1 Row 3</td>
        <td class='column2'>Column2 Row 3</td>
        <td class='column3'>Column3 Row 3</td>
        <td class='column4'>Column4 Row 3</td>
    </tr><tr class='t_row'>
        <td class='column1'>Column1 Row 4</td>
        <td class='column2'>Column2 Row 4</td>
        <td class='column3'>Column3 Row 4</td>
        <td class='column4'>Column4 Row 4</td>
    </tr><tr class='t_row'>
        <td class='column1'>Column1 Row 5</td>
        <td class='column2'>Column2 Row 5</td>
        <td class='column3'>Column3 Row 5</td>
        <td class='column4'>Column4 Row 5</td>
    </tr><tr class='t_row'>
        <td class='column1'>Column1 Row 6</td>
        <td class='column2'>Column2 Row 6</td>
        <td class='column3'>Column3 Row 6</td>
        <td class='column4'>Column4 Row 6</td>
    </tr><tr class='t_row'>
        <td class='column1'>Column1 Row 7</td>
        <td class='column2'>Column2 Row 7</td>
        <td class='column3'>Column3 Row 7</td>
        <td class='column4'>Column4 Row 7</td>
    </tr><tr class='t_row'>
        <td class='column1'>Column1 Row 8</td>
        <td class='column2'>Column2 Row 8</td>
        <td class='column3'>Column3 Row 8</td>
        <td class='column4'>Column4 Row 8</td>
    </tr><tr class='t_row'>
        <td class='column1'>Column1 Row 9</td>
        <td class='column2'>Column2 Row 9</td>
        <td class='column3'>Column3 Row 9</td>
        <td class='column4'>Column4 Row 9</td>
    </tr><tr class='t_row'>
        <td class='column1'>Column1 Row 10</td>
        <td class='column2'>Column2 Row 10</td>
        <td class='column3'>Column3 Row 10</td>
        <td class='column4'>Column4 Row 10</td>
    </tr>
<!--
<?php
$data = array();
for($a = 0; $a<50; $a++)
{
    $data[$a] = array();
    $data[$a][0] = "Column1 Row ".$a;
    $data[$a][1] = "Column2 Row ".$a;
    $data[$a][2] = "Column3 Row ".$a;
    $data[$a][3] = "Column4 Row ".$a;
}
/*
 ** supose you have data in an array.. which red from database. The table will draw using array data. Or you can draw the table manualy.
 ** tip: If using manual table, No need of
 ** 'var x = document.getElementsByClassName(object); var y = x[0].clientWidth;'.
 ** You can just set ID of first row's cells in to some name and use it to read width.
 */
for($i=0;$i<sizeof($data);$i++){
    echo "<tr class='t_row'><td class='column1'>".$data[$i][0]."</td><td class='column2'>".$data[$i][1]."</td><td class='column3'>".$data[$i][2]."</td><td class='column4'>".$data[$i][3]."</td></tr>";
}
?>
-->
</table>
</div>
</body>
</html>
Salitha Prasad
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