jquery ui dialog fixed positioning

Question

I needed the dialog to maintain its position fixed even if the page scrolled, so i used the extension at http://forum.jquery.com/topic/dialog-position-fixed-12-1-2010 but there's 2 problems with it:

• it flickers in IE and Firefox on page scroll (in Safari/Chrome it's fine)

• on closing and then reopening, it looses its stickyness and scrolls along with the page.

Here's the code i'm using for creating the dialog:

$('<div id="'+divpm_id+'"><div id="inner_'+divpm_id+'"></div><textarea class="msgTxt" id="txt'+divpm_id+'" rows="2"></textarea></div>')
                .dialog({
                autoOpen: true,
                title: user_str,
                height: 200,
                stack: true,
                sticky: true //uses ui dialog extension to keep it fixed
     });

And here's the code i'm using for reopening it:

jQuery('#'+divpm_id).parent().css('display','block');

Suggestions/solutions?

Thanks

Answer 1

I tried some of the solutions posted here, but they don't work if the page has been scrolled prior to the dialog being opened. The problem is that it calculates the position without taking into account the scroll position, because the position is absolute during this calculation.

The solution I found was to set the dialog's parent's CSS to fixed PRIOR to opening the dialog.

$('#my-dialog').parent().css({position:"fixed"}).end().dialog('open');

This assumes that you have already initialized the dialog with autoOpen set to false.

Note, this does not work if the dialog is resizable. It must be initialized with resizing disabled in order for the position to remain fixed.

$('#my-dialog').dialog({ autoOpen: false, resizable: false });

Tested this thoroughly and have found no bugs so far.