Fix: jqGrid search operator menu items jumping around on hover

A colleague noticed earlier on today, that on the Chrome browser they were using, the search operator menu items of a jqGrid on a web app’s UI were jumping around on hover, making it practically impossible to select one.

  

Seems this had started occurring on that ASP.net MVC web application, after a recent update to the latest jQuery-UI NuGet package.

Probably the issue wouldn’t occur if it wasn’t using the older free version of jqGrid. Will probably transition it eventually to free-jqGrid, the free fork (and quite evolved since forked) of the older free version of jqGrid, since jqGrid’s newer version is now commercial.

For the time being, I ended up adding this fix to Content/Site.css of the ASP.net MVC webapp:

/* jqGrid search operator menu item hover (uses jQuey-UI) */

a.ui-corner-all.g-menu-item.ui-state-hover {
    border: 1px #cccccc !important; /* fix for Chrome: removed "solid" (was causing hovered items to resize and menu to relayout, making it too hard to select them */
    /*border: 1px solid #cccccc;*/ /* this is used by jQuery-UI for .ui-state-hover */

    color: blue; /* showing blue color for hovered over menu text, should show better than a hover border since selected item already has a border itself */
}

This also has the added extra that on hover it shows the hovered item’s text in blue:

Fix: jQuery’s jqGrid search UI custom styling

Lately, I’ve got the task of maintaining/extending an ASP.net MVC web application that is using jQuery’s jqGrid for data grids on its UI. First thing I noticed was how confusing the search UI on the grid’s header was:

Those symbols on the left-side of each column’s searchbox are for the type of search (e.g. contains, doesn’t contain, equals, starts with, doesn’t start with, ends with, doesn’t end with).

Bit too many options and using programming-related symbols that probably intimidate several users in my opinion:

But the worse is the “x” button (that clears the searchbox) on the right of each searchbox, that combined with the search-type symbols makes the whole search bar look like some strange mathematical expression.

So using the browser dev tools (F12) and some CSS rules I quickly restyled that search bar to make it more appealing UI/UX wise:

Added a border around the “x” button that clears the searchbox and offseted using a negative margin so that the searchbox and it fuse together visually on their sides. Also made the search-type symbol (that opens the search-type selection popup when clicked) of lighter color. It may look a bit-like some disabled thing like that, but at least it should confuse average users less with its use of technical symbols like that.

Just need to add the rules above at the ASP.net MVC app’s Site.css (probably to be found at the Content subfolder of the webapp) and remember to press F5/Refresh in one’s browser in case the old styling still appears due to caching.

Update #1:

I noticed on older versions of Windows (other than Windows 10 that is) that bevels were showing at the text inputs, leading to this ugly effect:

So I had to add some more rules to remove the bevel borders and use a consistent border color.

Removing the bevels seemed to also remove the inner padding of the text inputs, so added a padding of 2px and some box-sizing rules to make sure the padding doesn’t affect the input’s size.

/* OS-independent styling for input and textarea borders */
textarea,
input[type="text"],
input[type="password"] {
    border-style: solid;
    border-width: 1px;
    border-color: gray;
    padding: 2px;
    -webkit-box-sizing: border-box; /* Safari/Chrome, other WebKit */
    -moz-box-sizing: border-box; /* Firefox, other Gecko */
    box-sizing: border-box; /* Opera/IE 8+ */
}

Update #2:

After recently updating some jQuery related NuGet packages in that ASP.net project, I noticed the [x] button was showing a bit higher up at the bottom compared to the search box. The fix to that was to add padding-bottom: 1px; at the CSS declaration for clearsearchclass in Content/Site.css

a.clearsearchclass {
    border-width: 1px;
    border-style: solid;
    /* border-left-style: none; */
    margin-left: -3px;
    padding-bottom: 1px; /* seems to be needed with newer jQuery.UI */
    background: whitesmoke;
    border-color: gray;
}