Ok so the story is my users need a multi-select dropdownlist, which doesn’t exist in ASP.NET, so the simple solution I’m going with is I’m using listboxes with multiselect on and I start them off at size 1, and onmouseover I change the size to say 10, onmouseout sets it back to one. Simple enough and the users don’t know the difference.
Now, my issue comes from the fact that since I have any number of controls on my web app, I’ve set these listboxes to higher z-index numbers than the other controls, which creates a problem: on my listboxes closer to the bottom of the page the list expands below and not above, and part of the listbox goes under the bottom of the page but since onmouseout resets the size of the listbox I can’t scroll the page down.
Does anybody know what I need to set to make it expand up instead of down?
edit Also, some may ask “why don’t you just rearrange the listbox to a higher position in the page,” the reason this isn’t a viable option is I have well over 40 controls on the page and it they’re grouped cohesively, I didn’t just randomly place them where they are.(ie. investment info in one section, account in another, suitability in another)
EDIT: It’s worth noting that the jQuery version of the below will be more compact and, in my opinion, more easily understood.
Glo, the code you have currently would be helpful here, especially since it seems you will have difficulty changing anything we give, or implementing what we might describe. Anyway, this works as intended in IE7, Firefox, and Opera; Safari and Chrome go quirky with it: http://jsfiddle.net/bUFzq/35/ (modified from http://www.plus2net.com/html_tutorial/html_frmddl.php).
The CSS just makes the select position-able relative to its default placement. Elements can only be positioned relative to other positioned elements. `position: relative;’ leaves the element where it was until you move it, unlike absolute and fixed. It also positions relative to the edges of its nearest positioned ancestor. (The IT industry has the unfortunate convention of increasing Y downward rather than upward; just a heads up – or down.)
element.offsetHeight is the computed height of the element – how big it appears on the screen. element.style.bottom (like its cousins top, left, and right) sets the element’s offset from the corresponding edge, in the direction of the element’s center. setAttribute is fairly self-explanatory; it acts as if you were actually editing the HTML. Most properties of element.style (that aren’t on all other objects) represent and modify similarly named CSS properties. For example, element.style.backgroundColor sets the background-color property.
addEvent is a function copied from Dustin Diaz’s Rock Solid addEvent() because the browsers don’t agree very well on how to do events. However, I would have put his script in a separate file and mine in yet another if I weren’t working within a single script area. I did the `var addEvent = init();’ thing just so you wouldn’t have to scroll through his source, even though it is a good example of good code.
mouseover & mouseout are the actual listeners, explicitly called using apply 1) because I needed that height value for later and 2) because for some reason (at least within jsFiddle) it doesn’t start out in the correct position, and only if the listeners are called in that order will it get there.