Recommendations for Many Tooltips

[Izrun]

Hi. First off, I want to thank you for developting such a great tool.
I am using it extensively in my (internal) site, and it has been a
lifesaver.

All right, I need a recommendation. The page in question is a large
page that displays, in a giant table, the output of a database. Each
row can have up to 9 tooltips associated with it (max 1 per column).
All of the tooltips are of the non-sticky, mouseover variety. There
are currently about 500 entries in the database, and it will be
continually growing. I know all of the information I want to store in
the tooltip at runtime. My question for you is as follows: What do
you think the best way to do this is? I currently have inline
onmouseover events associated with every tooltip, with the caption
filled in when the page is displayed. I was thinking about it, and
this is a massive amount of tips. Do I need to make sure that I
destroy the tip every time I mouseout instead of just hiding it?
Should I only use a few actual tooltips and just replace the text in
them? I thought that maybe with so many tooltips, if each one was
created and stored into memory there could be problems. Anyway, I
figured you might have some tips on what to do. Thanks, and keep up
the great work.

-Izrun

[Dan Allen]

If you are dealing with a very large number of tooltips, it is more
effective to use the closeAction destroy feature so that the tip is
recreated each time and does hang around. This will improve the
memory footprint. In order to define the tooltips, it would be a good
idea to pull them using AJAX. Instead of calling domTT_activate in
your mouseover, you just call domTT_ajaxActivate and be sure to pass
"this" and "event". Then lookup the contents, construct the
arguments, and pass that to domTT_activate. This will make your page
size much smaller. That is just one approach.

/dan

--
Daniel Allen
Registered Linux User #231597

Mojavelinux.com: Open Source Advocacy
http://www.mojavelinux.com

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