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jQuery PowerTip

A jQuery plugin that creates hover tooltips.

Summary

PowerTip features a very flexible design that is easy to customize, gives you a number of different ways to use the tooltips and supports adding complex data to tooltips. It is being actively developed and maintained, and provides a very fluid user experience.

Features

  • Straightforward implementation
  • Simple configuration
  • Supports static tooltips as well as tooltips that follow the mouse
  • Ability to let users mouse on to the tooltips and interact with their content
  • Tests for hover intent
  • Mouse follow tooltips are constrained to the browser viewport
  • Easy customization
  • Smooth fade-ins and fade-outs
  • Smart placement that (when enabled) will try to keep tooltips inside of the view port
  • Multiple instances
  • Works on any type of element
  • Supports complex content (markup with behavior & events)
  • Small footprint (only 3kb minified)
  • Actively maintained

Requirements

  • jQuery 1.7 or later

Usage

Running the plugin is about as standard as it gets.

$('.tooltips').powerTip(options)

Where options is an object with the various settings you want to override (all defined below).

For example, if you want to attach tootips to all elements with the "info" class, and have those tooltip appear above and to the right of those elements you would use the following code:

$('.info').powerTip({
	placement: 'ne' // north-east tooltip position
});

Setting tooltip content

Generally, if your tooltips are just plain text then you probably want to set your tooltip text with the HTML title attribute on the elements themselves. This approach is very intuitive and backwards compatible. But there are several ways to specify the content.

Title attribute

The simplest method, as well as the only one that will continue to work for users who have JavaScript disabled in their browsers.

<a href="/some/link" title="This will be the tooltip text.">Some Link</a>

data-powertip

Basically the same as setting the title attribute, but using an HTML5 data attribute. You can set this in the markup or with JavaScript at any time. It only accepts a simple string, but that string can contain markup.

$('#element').data('powertip', 'This will be the <b>tooltip text</b>.');

or

<a href="/some/link" data-powertip="This will be the &lt;b&gt;tooltip text&lt;/b&gt;.">Some Link</a>

data-powertipjq

This is a data interface that will accept a jQuery object. You can create a jQuery object containing complex markup (and even events) and attach it to the element via jQuery's .data() method at any time.

var tooltip = $('<div>This will be the tooltip text. It even has an onclick event!</div>');
tooltip.on('click', function() { /* ... */ });

$('#element').data('powertipjq', tooltip);

data-powertiptarget

You can specify the ID of an element in the DOM to pull the content from. PowerTip will replicate the markup of that element in the tooltip without modifying or destroying the original.

<div id="myToolTip">
	<p><b>Some Title</b></p>
	<p>This will be the tooltip text.</p>
	<p><a href="#">This link will be in the tooltip as well.</a></p>
</div>
$('#element').data('powertiptarget', 'myToolTip');

Options

The tooltip behavior is determined by a series of options that you can override. You can pass the options as an object directly to the plugin as an argument when you call it. For example:

$('.tips').powerTip({
	option1: 'value',
	option2: 'value',
	option3: 'value'
});

The settings will only apply to those tooltips matched in the selector. This means that you can have different sets of tooltips on the same page with different options. For example:

$('.tips').powerTip(/** options for regular tooltips **/);

$('.specialTips').powerTip(/** options for special tooltips **/);

You can change the default options for all tooltips by setting their values in the $.fn.powerTip.defaults object before you call powerTip(). For example:

// change the default tooltip placement to south
$.fn.powerTip.defaults.placement = 's';

$('.tips').powerTip(); // these tips will appear underneath the element

Of course those defaults will be overridden with any options you pass directly to the powerTip() call.

List of options

Name Default Type Description
followMouse false Boolean If set to true the tooltip will follow the users mouse cursor.
mouseOnToPopup false Boolean Allow the mouse to hover on the tooltip. This lets users interact with the content in the tooltip. Only works if followMouse is set to false.
placement 'n' String Placement location of the tooltip relative to the element it is open for. Values can be n, e, s, w, nw, ne, sw, or se (as in north, east, south, and west). This only matters if followMouse is set to false.
smartPlacement false Boolean When enabled the plugin will try to keep tips inside the browser view port. If a tooltip would extend outside of the view port then its placement will be changed to an orientation that would be entirely within the current view port. Only applies if followMouse is set to false.
popupId 'powerTip' String HTML id attribute for the tooltip div.
offset 10 Number Pixel offset of the tooltip. This will be the offset from the element the tooltip is open for, or from from mouse cursor if followMouse is true.
fadeInTime 200 Number Tooltip fade-in time in milliseconds.
fadeOutTime 100 Number Tooltip fade-out time in milliseconds.
closeDelay 100 Number Time in milliseconds to wait after mouse cursor leaves the element before closing the tooltip.
intentPollInterval 100 Number Hover intent polling interval in milliseconds.
intentSensitivity 7 Number Hover intent sensitivity. The tooltip will not open unless the number of pixels the mouse has moved within the intentPollInterval is less than this value. These default values mean that if the mouse cursor has moved 7 or more pixels in 100 milliseconds the tooltip will not open.

About smart placement

Smart placement is a feature that will attempt to keep non-mouse-follow tooltips within the browser view port. When it is enabled PowerTip will automatically change the placement of any tooltip that would appear outside of the view port, such as a tooltip that would push outside the left or right bounds of the window, or a tooltip that would be hidden below the fold.

Without smart placement:

Example without smart placement

With smart placement:

Example with smart placement

It does this by detecting that a tooltip would appear outside of the view port, then trying a series of other placement options until it finds one that isn't going to be outside of the view port. You can define the placement fall backs and priorities yourself by overriding them in the $.fn.powerTip.smartPlacementLists object.

These are the default smart placement priority lists:

$.fn.powerTip.smartPlacementLists = {
	n: ['n', 'ne', 'nw', 's'],
	e: ['e', 'ne', 'se', 'w', 'nw', 'sw', 'n', 's', 'e'],
	s: ['s', 'se', 'sw', 'n'],
	w: ['w', 'nw', 'sw', 'e', 'ne', 'se', 'n', 's', 'w'],
	nw: ['nw', 'w', 'sw', 'n', 's', 'se', 'nw'],
	ne: ['ne', 'e', 'se', 'n', 's', 'sw', 'ne'],
	sw: ['sw', 'w', 'nw', 's', 'n', 'ne', 'sw'],
	se: ['se', 'e', 'ne', 's', 'n', 'nw', 'se']
};

As you can see, each placement option has an array of placement options that it can fall back on. The first item in the array is the highest priority placement, the last is the lowest priority. The last item in the array is also the default. If none of the placement options can be fully displayed within the view port then the last item in the array is the placement used to show the tooltip.

You can override these default placement priority lists before you call powerTip() and define your own smart placement fall back order. Like so:

// define custom smart placement order
$.fn.powerTip.smartPlacementLists.n = ['n', 's', 'e', 'w'];

// these tips will use the custom 'north' smart placement list
$('.tips').powerTip({
	placement: 'n',
	smartPlacement: true
})

Smart placement is disabled by default because I believe that the world would be a better place if features that override explicit configuration values were disabled by default.

Similar Projects

There are many other great JavaScript tooltip projects that are worth taking a look at and may better suit your needs. Here is a list of some of my favorite jQuery tooltip plugins:

License

(This project is released under the MIT license.)

Copyright (c) 2012 Steven Benner, http://stevenbenner.com/

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.