Popovers Tooltips

Documentation and examples for adding custom BMDL popovers & tooltips with CSS and JavaScript.

Popovers: Add small overlay content, like those found in iOS, to any element for housing secondary information. Tooltips: Inspired by the excellent Tipsy jQuery plugin written by Jason Frame. Tooltips are an updated version, which don’t rely on images, use CSS3 for animations, and data-attributes for local title storage.

Contents

Overview: Popovers

Things to know when using the popover plugin:

  • Popovers rely on the 3rd party library Tether for positioning. You must include tether.min.js before bootstrap.js in order for popovers to work!
  • Popovers require the tooltip plugin as a dependency.
  • Popovers are opt-in for performance reasons, so you must initialize them yourself.
  • Zero-length title and content values will never show a popover.
  • Specify container: 'body' to avoid rendering problems in more complex components (like our input groups, button groups, etc).
  • Triggering popovers on hidden elements will not work.
  • Popovers for .disabled or disabled elements must be triggered on a wrapper element.
  • When triggered from hyperlinks that span multiple lines, popovers will be centered. Use white-space: nowrap; on your <a>s to avoid this behavior.

Got all that? Great, let’s see how they work with some examples.

Example: Enable popovers everywhere

One way to initialize all popovers on a page would be to select them by their data-toggle attribute:

$(function () {
  $('[data-toggle="popover"]').popover()
})

Example: Using the container option

When you have some styles on a parent element that interfere with a popover, you’ll want to specify a custom container so that the popover’s HTML appears within that element instead.

$(function () {
  $('.example-popover').popover({
    container: 'body'
  })
})

Static popover

Four options are available: top, right, bottom, and left aligned.

Popover top

Sed posuere consectetur est at lobortis. Aenean eu leo quam. Pellentesque ornare sem lacinia quam venenatis vestibulum.

Popover right

Sed posuere consectetur est at lobortis. Aenean eu leo quam. Pellentesque ornare sem lacinia quam venenatis vestibulum.

Popover bottom

Sed posuere consectetur est at lobortis. Aenean eu leo quam. Pellentesque ornare sem lacinia quam venenatis vestibulum.

Popover left

Sed posuere consectetur est at lobortis. Aenean eu leo quam. Pellentesque ornare sem lacinia quam venenatis vestibulum.

Demo: Drug Database

<button id="drugDBPop" type="button" class="btn btn-link" data-trigger="focus" data-toggle="popover">Click to toggle drug database popover</button>

Demo: Evidence score

<button type="button" id="evidencePop" class="btn btn-link" data-trigger="focus" data-toggle="popover">Click to toggle drug database popover</button>

Demo: References popovers

<button type="button" id="referencePop" class="btn btn-link" data-trigger="focus" data-toggle="popover">Click to toggle reference link popover</button>

Demo: Cochrane answers

<button type="button" id="CochranePop" class="btn btn-link" data-trigger="focus" data-toggle="popover">Click to toggle drug Cochrane popover</button>

Four directions

<button type="button" class="btn btn-secondary" data-container="body" data-toggle="popover" data-placement="top" data-content="Vivamus sagittis lacus vel augue laoreet rutrum faucibus.">
  Popover on top
</button>
<button type="button" class="btn btn-secondary" data-container="body" data-toggle="popover" data-placement="right" data-content="Vivamus sagittis lacus vel augue laoreet rutrum faucibus.">
  Popover on right
</button>
<button type="button" class="btn btn-secondary" data-container="body" data-toggle="popover" data-placement="bottom" data-content="Vivamus
sagittis lacus vel augue laoreet rutrum faucibus.">
  Popover on bottom
</button>
<button type="button" class="btn btn-secondary" data-container="body" data-toggle="popover" data-placement="left" data-content="Vivamus sagittis lacus vel augue laoreet rutrum faucibus.">
  Popover on left
</button>

Dismiss on next click

Use the focus trigger to dismiss popovers on the next click that the user makes.

Specific markup required for dismiss-on-next-click

For proper cross-browser and cross-platform behavior, you must use the <a> tag, not the <button> tag, and you also must include a tabindex attribute.

Dismissible popover 
<a tabindex="0" class="btn btn-lg btn-danger" role="button" data-toggle="popover" data-trigger="focus" title="Dismissible popover" data-content="And here's some amazing content. It's very engaging. Right?">Dismissible popover</a>
$('.popover-dismiss').popover({
  trigger: 'focus'
})

Usage

Enable popovers via JavaScript:

$('#example').popover(options)

Options

Options can be passed via data attributes or JavaScript. For data attributes, append the option name to data-, as in data-animation="".

Name Type Default Description
animation boolean true Apply a CSS fade transition to the popover
container string | false false

Appends the popover to a specific element. Example: container: 'body'. This option is particularly useful in that it allows you to position the popover in the flow of the document near the triggering element - which will prevent the popover from floating away from the triggering element during a window resize.
content string | element | function ''

Default content value if data-content attribute isn't present.

If a function is given, it will be called with its this reference set to the element that the popover is attached to.
delay number | object 0

Delay showing and hiding the popover (ms) - does not apply to manual trigger type

If a number is supplied, delay is applied to both hide/show

Object structure is: delay: { "show": 500, "hide": 100 }
html boolean false Insert HTML into the popover. If false, jQuery's text method will be used to insert content into the DOM. Use text if you're worried about XSS attacks.
placement string | function 'right'

How to position the popover - top | bottom | left | right.

When a function is used to determine the placement, it is called with the popover DOM node as its first argument and the triggering element DOM node as its second. The this context is set to the popover instance.
selector string false If a selector is provided, popover objects will be delegated to the specified targets. In practice, this is used to enable dynamic HTML content to have popovers added. See this and an informative example.
template string '<div class="popover" role="tooltip"><div class="popover-arrow"></div><h3 class="popover-title"></h3><div class="popover-content"></div></div>'

Base HTML to use when creating the popover.

The popover's title will be injected into the .popover-title.

The popover's content will be injected into the .popover-content.

.popover-arrow will become the popover's arrow.

The outermost wrapper element should have the .popover class.
title string | element | function ''

Default title value if title attribute isn't present.

If a function is given, it will be called with its this reference set to the element that the popover is attached to.
trigger string 'click' How popover is triggered - click | hover | focus | manual. You may pass multiple triggers; separate them with a space. `manual` cannot be combined with any other trigger.
constraints Array 'hover focus' An array of constraints - passed through to Tether. For more information refer to Tether's constraint docs.
offset string '0 0' Offset of the popover relative to its target. For more information refer to Tether's offset docs.

Data attributes for individual popovers

Options for individual popovers can alternatively be specified through the use of data attributes, as explained above.

Methods

$().popover(options)

Initializes popovers for an element collection.

.popover('show')

Reveals an element’s popover. Returns to the caller before the popover has actually been shown (i.e. before the shown.bs.popover event occurs). This is considered a “manual” triggering of the popover. Popovers whose both title and content are zero-length are never displayed.

$('#element').popover('show')

.popover('hide')

Hides an element’s popover. Returns to the caller before the popover has actually been hidden (i.e. before the hidden.bs.popover event occurs). This is considered a “manual” triggering of the popover.

$('#element').popover('hide')

.popover('toggle')

Toggles an element’s popover. Returns to the caller before the popover has actually been shown or hidden (i.e. before the shown.bs.popover or hidden.bs.popover event occurs). This is considered a “manual” triggering of the popover.

$('#element').popover('toggle')

.popover('dispose')

Hides and destroys an element’s popover. Popovers that use delegation (which are created using the selector option) cannot be individually destroyed on descendant trigger elements.

$('#element').popover('dispose')

Events

Event Type Description
show.bs.popover This event fires immediately when the show instance method is called.
shown.bs.popover This event is fired when the popover has been made visible to the user (will wait for CSS transitions to complete).
hide.bs.popover This event is fired immediately when the hide instance method has been called.
hidden.bs.popover This event is fired when the popover has finished being hidden from the user (will wait for CSS transitions to complete). 
$('#myPopover').on('hidden.bs.popover', function () {
  // do something…
})