Theory of Relativity

Recently whilst putting a .NET web project to bed we had yet more reports from the field of some rendering issues with Internet Explorer 7.  Of course we had tested IE 7 using the compatibility modes present within later versions of IE but seemingly this does not throw up many issues that arise in the ‘real’ browser.

I know, I know…., in an ideal world we’d all have the latest and greatest browsers but in the real world companies are not so ‘lithe’ when it comes IT infrastructure.

The issue being reported was that one form displaying an accordion control, which in turn had embedded within it a scrollable div which in turn contained three or four divs as well as a JQGrid was having ‘issues of parentage’… When the main scrollable div was being scrolled all underlying divs were being rendered correctly and scrolling with the content whilst the JQGrid was not moving at all, just merely floating in space and generally getting in the way. After a lot of digging I found the following solution that cured my issues:- The main HTML was defined thus

  with the ‘QuestionnaireGrid’ being the location that the javascript JQGrid is rendered into, The issue however seems to lie with the parent div and not the JQGrid itself, what I needed to do was attach a style via the css to the ‘QuestionnaireGridContainer’ div like thus:

 

 

 
This ‘position:relative’ style  in this instance seems to explicitly force all children objects to behave correctly with regard to their location within time and space and now when i scroll my div content all child objects are scrolled exactly as I would expect.

Written by:  Conrad Rowlands, Senior Systems Architect and Developer, DSCallards