The current jquery-based ace:tooltip is lacking some important features vs. the existing ice:panelTooltip component. The goal of the new ace:component is to provide equal or (ideally) better feature coverage as the existing ice: component.

Features lacking include:

• displayListener - used to update the tooltip panel contents immediately prior to display (requires round-trip)
• ability to update content dynamically (see displayListener)
• mousetracking (moveWithMouse)
• Draggable tooltip panel
• Built in (optional) header/body facets
• Robust tooltip positioning (vs. numerous reported issues with qtip/jquery component).

Having noted the deficiencies, the jquery tooltip has the following desirable features that the ice:panelTooltip lacks:

• Use any event type to trigger display/hide of tooltip
• effects/transitions support for showing/hiding tooltip
• Custom positioning modes (top-left, bottom-right, etc.)
• Ability to use with any parent component (ice:panelTooltip is limited to ice:panelGroup)
• Simple text mode (use value attribute to display simple text tooltip
• global mode, which uses parent components title attribute for tooltip text.

We need to assess if the jquery tooltip can be extended to support the missing features feasibly, or if we should instead re-implement this component ourselves to provide both sets of desirable features.

Also note another reported JS error issue with the jquery tooltip: ICE-7220

It seems feasible to extend the existing jquery tooltip to support most fesatures, but for some of them we might need to modify the qtip code. More details below:

• Draggable tooltip panel
  Making things draggable in jquery is very common and straight-forward.

• Built in (optional) header/body facets
  The existing component already supports including HTML and other components inside a tooltip. Adding header/body facets has been done with other components and should present no problems.

• displayListener - used to update the tooltip panel contents immediately prior to display (requires round-trip)
• ability to update content dynamically (see displayListener)
  The qtip website ( http://craigsworks.com/projects/qtip/demos/ ) shows ways to update content dynamically. So the qtip api would support these features.

• mousetracking (moveWithMouse)
• Robust tooltip positioning (vs. numerous reported issues with qtip/jquery component).
  These features seem to be the most challenging. Most likely it would require to modify the qtip code.

This component has been tested using grimlock rev# 25582 on tomcat6 server using the browsers: IE7, Firefox 3.6.7, Gchrome14.
Test pages are located at: repo\qa\trunk\Regression-Icefaces2\Sparkle\tooltip

ISSUES:

All browsers

1. The only effect that seems to work is 'fade'.

2. Tooltip inside SparkleTabSet: The Tooltip renders outside of the tabSet (See attached screenshot).

Target missing effect support and positioning issues for 2.1.

attached test files for displayListener feature

While working on ICE-7254, I realized that when using displayListener of a tooltip inside a tabset, the whole content of the content pane was updated, which resulting in re-initializing the tooltip widget and firing again the ajax request to trigger the display listener. This provoked an infinite loop. I added some code to only allow one tooltip with the same client id to be displayed on the page at a time.