HTML table headers always visible at top of window when viewing a large table

I would like to be able to "tweak" an HTML table's presentation to add a single feature: when scrolling down through the page so that the table is on the screen but the header rows are off-screen, I would like the headers to remain visible at the top of the viewing area.

This would be conceptually like the "freeze panes" feature in Excel. However, an HTML page might contain several tables in it and I only would want it to happen for the table that is currently in-view, only while it is in-view.

Note: I've seen one solution where the table data area is made scrollable while the headers do not scroll. That's not the solution I'm looking for.

Solution 1:

I've made a proof-of-concept solution using jQuery.

View sample here.

I've now got this code in a Mercurial bitbucket repository. The main file is tables.html.

I'm aware of one issue with this: if the table contains anchors, and if you open the URL with the specified anchor in a browser, when the page loads, the row with the anchor will probably be obscured by the floating header.

Update 2017-12-11: I see this doesn't work with current Firefox (57) and Chrome (63). Not sure when and why this stopped working, or how to fix it. But now, I think the accepted answer by Hendy Irawan is superior.

Solution 2:

Check out jQuery.floatThead (demos available) which is very cool, can work with DataTables too, and can even work inside an overflow: auto container.

Solution 3:

Craig, I refined your code a bit (among a few other things it's now using position:fixed) and wrapped it as a jQuery plugin.

Try it out here: http://jsfiddle.net/jmosbech/stFcx/

And get the source here: https://github.com/jmosbech/StickyTableHeaders

Solution 4:

If you're targeting modern css3 compliant browsers (Browser support: https://caniuse.com/#feat=css-sticky) you can use position:sticky, which doesn't require JS and won't break the table layout miss-aligning th and td of the same column. Nor does it require fixed column width to work properly.

Example for a single header row:

thead th
{
    position: sticky;
    top: 0px;
}

For theads with 1 or 2 rows, you can use something like this:

thead > :last-child th
{
    position: sticky;
    top: 30px; /* This is for all the the "th" elements in the second row, (in this casa is the last child element into the thead) */
}

thead > :first-child th
{
    position: sticky;
    top: 0px; /* This is for all the the "th" elements in the first child row */
}

You might need to play a bit with the top property of the last child changing the number of pixels to match the height of the first row (+ the margin + the border + the padding, if any), so the second row sticks just down bellow the first one.

Also both solutions work even if you have more than one table in the same page: the th element of each one starts to be sticky when its top position is the one indicated into the css definition and just disappear when all the table scrolls down. So if there are more tables all work beautifully the same way.

Why to use last-child before and first-child after in the css?

Because css rules are rendered by the browser in the same order as you write them into the css file and because of this if you have just 1 row into the thead element the first row is simultaneously the last row too and the first-child rule need to override the last-child one. If not you will have an offset of the row 30 px from the top margin which I suppose you don't want to.

A known problem of position: sticky is that it doesn't work on thead elements or table rows: you must target th elements. Hopping this issue will be solved on future browser versions.

Solution 5:

Possible alternatives

js-floating-table-headers

js-floating-table-headers (Google Code)

In Drupal

I have a Drupal 6 site. I was on the admin "modules" page, and noticed the tables had this exact feature!

Looking at the code, it seems to be implemented by a file called tableheader.js. It applies the feature on all tables with the class sticky-enabled.

For a Drupal site, I'd like to be able to make use of that tableheader.js module as-is for user content. tableheader.js doesn't seem to be present on user content pages in Drupal. I posted a forum message to ask how to modify the Drupal theme so it's available. According to a response, tableheader.js can be added to a Drupal theme using drupal_add_js() in the theme's template.php as follows:

drupal_add_js('misc/tableheader.js', 'core');