How to make Scrollable Table with fixed headers using CSS

Xavi picture Xavi · Oct 24, 2013 · Viewed 296.7k times · Source

I want to make header of my table fixed.Table is present inside the scrollable div.Please see my code here: http://jsfiddle.net/w7Mm8/114/ kindly suggest me the solution to this.

Thanks

My Code:

<div style="position: absolute; height: 200px; overflow: auto; ">
    <div style="height: 250px;">
        <table border="1">
            <th>head1</th>
            <th>head2</th>
            <th>head3</th>
            <th>head4</th>
            <tr>
                <td>row 1, cell 1</td>
                <td>row 1, cell 2</td>
                <td>row 1, cell 2</td>
                <td>row 1, cell 2</td>
            </tr>
            <tr>
                <td>row 2, cell 1</td>
                <td>row 2, cell 2</td>
                <td>row 1, cell 2</td>
                <td>row 1, cell 2</td>
            </tr>
        </table>
    </div>
</div>

Answer

nkmol picture nkmol · Oct 24, 2013

What you want to do is separate the content of the table from the header of the table. You want only the <th> elements to be scrolled. You can easily define this separation in HTML with the <tbody> and the <thead> elements.
Now the header and the body of the table are still connected to each other, they will still have the same width (and same scroll properties). Now to let them not 'work' as a table anymore you can set the display: block. This way <thead> and <tbody> are separated.

table tbody, table thead
{
    display: block;
}

Now you can set the scroll to the body of the table:

table tbody 
{
   overflow: auto;
   height: 100px;
}

And last, because the <thead> doesn't share the same width as the body anymore, you should set a static width to the header of the table:

th
{
    width: 72px;
}

You should also set a static width for <td>. This solves the issue of the unaligned columns.

td
{
    width: 72px;
}


Note that you are also missing some HTML elements. Every row should be in a <tr> element, that includes the header row:

<tr>
     <th>head1</th>
     <th>head2</th>
     <th>head3</th>
     <th>head4</th>
</tr>

I hope this is what you meant.

jsFiddle

Addendum

If you would like to have more control over the column widths, have them to vary in width between each other, and course keep the header and body columns aligned, you can use the following example:

    table th:nth-child(1), td:nth-child(1) { min-width: 50px;  max-width: 50px; }
    table th:nth-child(2), td:nth-child(2) { min-width: 100px; max-width: 100px; }
    table th:nth-child(3), td:nth-child(3) { min-width: 150px; max-width: 150px; }
    table th:nth-child(4), td:nth-child(4) { min-width: 200px; max-width: 200px; }