QicsTable Documentation Set

HOWTO - Cell Overflowing

QicsTable has a number of ways to handle a cell that cannot display all of its data in the cell's normal area. One way is cell spanning, which allows a larger region of the table to always appear as one cell (see HOWTO - Cell Spanning for details). Cell spanning is very powerful, but has the sometimes undesirable effect of making any spanned cells invisible and uneditable.

Another, less intrusive way of displaying cell data that cannot fit into the cell's normal area is by setting the table's "cellOverflowBehavior" property. (This property is actually a common grid property, so you can set it on not only the table's main grid, but its row and column headers as well.) The table supports three types of overflow behavior.

The default overflow behavior is Clip. In this case, the text of the cell is displayed according to the current setting of the "gridCellClipping" property. The text will either be partially displayed (AllowPartial), not displayed at all (NoDisplayOnPartial), or partially displayed with a "clipped" symbol (UseClippedSymbol). In the last instance, the clipped symbol can be changed by setting the "moreTextPixmap" property.

Qics::Clip -- Text clipped at end of cell

The second overflow behavior is Overflow. In this case, the table will attempt to "overflow" the additional text to the next cell(s) to the right. When the table performs an overflow, it looks for the next cell to the right of the original cell. If that cell is empty, its area is added to the original cell's area to create a larger "cell". If this new area is large enough to display the entire text, the overflow is complete. If it still is not large enough, the table will continue by looking at the next cell to the right. This iteration continues until one of the following occurs: (1) the entire text can be displayed, (2) the next cell is not empty, (3) the right edge of the table is reached, or (4) the number of overflowed cells exceeds the current value of the "maxOverflowCells" property. If, at the end of this iteration, the entire text is still not visible, the full text is displayed according to the "gridCellClipping" property in as many cells as possible.

Qics::Overflow -- Text overflows to adjacent cells

When an empty cell is overflowed into, it is still able to be traversed to and edited. When the empty cell becomes the current cell, the overflow is removed. When the empty cell is no longer the current cell (i.e. the user traversed to another cell), the overflow appears again.

The third overflow behavior is Tooltip. In this case, the extra text is clipped as in the Clip behavior, but when the user hovers the mouse pointer over the cell, the entire contents of the cell is displayed in a tooltip.

Qics::ToolTip -- Text is shown in tooltip