Freezing the width of an HTML table column

Question

I'm trying to make a table with a fixed column, and i'm following this example:

http://jsfiddle.net/emn13/YMvk9/

Container:

 div { 
            width: 600px; 
            overflow-x:scroll;  
            margin-left:5em; 
            overflow-y:visible;
            padding-bottom:1px;
        }

Fixed column:

.headcol {
            position:absolute; 
            width:5em; 
            left:0;
            top:auto;
            border-right: 0px none black; 
            border-top-width:3px; /*only relevant for first row*/
            margin-top:-3px; /*compensate for top border*/
        }

The problem is that if the container has a fixed height, say 100px, the fixed column keeps it's default height without getting attached to the scrollbar.

Answer 1

Try adding an extra container, which you can set to relative positioning.

div#container{
    position:relative;
    height:100px;
    overflow:scroll;
}

You can see in the example below that the fixed rows scrolls vertically with the rest of the rows.

http://jsfiddle.net/VRNsX/

If you aren't averse to a little jQuery, here is another approach I worked out:

$('#tbl').scroll(function(e) {
    var self = this;
    $('.headcol').each(function() {
        $(this).css({
            'top': ($(this).index('.headcol') * $(this).outerHeight() + 3) - $(self).scrollTop()
        });
    });
});

http://jsfiddle.net/YMvk9/786/