Mouseover triggered on absolute positioned div

Posted by Tauren on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Tauren
Published on 2010-04-20T20:07:16Z Indexed on 2010/04/20 20:13 UTC
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Objective

Have a small magnifying glass icon that appears in the top right corner of a table cell when the table cell is hovered over. Mousing over the magnifying glass icon and clicking it will open a dialog window to show detailed information about the item in that particular table cell. I want to reuse the same icon for hundreds of table cells without recreating it each time.

Partial Solution

Have a single  that is absolutely positioned and hidden. When a _previewable table cell is hovered, the  is moved to the correct location and shown. This  is also moved in the DOM to be a child of the _previewable table cell. This enables a click handler attached to the  to find the _previewable parent, and get information from it's jquery data() object that is used to populate the contents of the dialog.

Here is a very simplified version of my HTML:

<body>
    <span id="options">
        <a class="ui-state-default ui-corner-all">
            <span class="ui-icon ui-icon-search"></span>
            Preview
        </a>
    </span>
    <table>
         <tr>
             <td class="_previewable">
                 <img scr="user_1.png"/>
                 <span>Bob Smith</span>
             </td>
        </tr>
   </table>
</body>

And this CSS:

#options {
    position: absolute;
    display: none;
}

With this jQuery code:

var $options = $('#options');
$options.click(function() {
    $item = $(this).parents("._previewable");
    // Show popup based on data in $item.data("id");
    Layout.renderPopup($item.data("id"),$item.data("popup"));               
});

$('._previewable').live('mouseover mouseout',function(event) {
    if (event.type == 'mouseover') {
        var $target = $(this);
        var $parent = $target.offsetParent()[0];

        var left = $parent.scrollLeft + $target.position().left 
            + $target.outerWidth() - $options.outerWidth() + 1;
        var top = $parent.scrollTop + $target.position().top + 2;

        $options.appendTo($target);
        $options.css({
            "left": left + "px",
            "top": top + "px"
        }).show();
    }
    else {
        // On mouseout, $options continues to be a child of $(this)
        $options.hide();
    }
});

Problem

This solution works perfectly until the contents of my table are reloaded or changed via AJAX. Because the  was moved from the <body> to be a child of the cell, it gets thrown out and replaced during the AJAX call. So my first thought is to move the  back to the body on mouseout of the table cell, like this:

    else {
        // On mouseout, $options is moved back to be a child of body
        $options.appendTo("body");
        $options.hide();
    }

However, with this, the  disappears as soon as it is mouseover. The mouseout event seems to be called on _previewable when the mouse moves into the , even though the  is a child of _previewable and fully displayed within the boundaries of the _previewable table cell. At this point, I've only tested this in Chrome.

Questions

Why would mouseout be called on _previewable, when the mouse is still within the boundaries of _previewable? Is it because the  is absolutely positioned?
How can I make this work, without recreating the  and it's click handler on each AJAX table referesh?

Developer IT