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.

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.