Wicket - DropDownChoice - titles (tooltips) for options

Question

Is there a way to have the DropDownChoice in Wicket assign tooltips (e.g. title attributes) to individual option elements?

I have selectbox items in the following form:

public class SelectBoxItem
{
    private Long id;
    private String label;
    private String description;
}

All items are loaded from the database.

I configure the DropDownChoice component using a ChoiceRenderer to use the ids as keys and the labels as values.

Now I would need to configure it to use the descriptions as tooltip messages as well.

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I have only found this related thread on the Internet. Browsing the relevant Wicket classes let me to the same conclusions as the author, e.g. that this was probably not possible with the current versions of the DropDownChoice/ChoiceRenderer classes. Is that right? And in that case, is there a similar component which would allow that?

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(For a more comprehensive description of my code base see my other question where I asked about a different problem within the same context.)

Answer 1

Here is my solution for this problem. Many thanks to Andrea Del Bene for the advice.

public class TitledDropDownChoice<T> extends DropDownChoice<T> {

//  ... constructors from superclass ...

@Override
protected void appendOptionHtml(AppendingStringBuffer buffer,
        T choice, int index, String selected) {

    super.appendOptionHtml(buffer, choice, index, selected);

    // converts <option value="foo">bar</option> to
    // <option value="foo" title="bar">bar</option>
    String replString = "value=\"" + getChoiceRenderer()
        .getIdValue(choice, index) + "\"";
    int pos = buffer.indexOf(replString);
    buffer.insert(pos + replString.length(), 
        " title=\"" + getChoiceRenderer().getDisplayValue(choice) + "\"");

}

}

Answer 2

Have you tried overriding method appendOptionHtml? You could use it to append the desired html (i.e. title="toolTipText").