Dealing With Disappearing “Position: Fixed” On Overflow?

Have you ever tried to have an element overflow when one of its children is in a fixed positioned relative to it?

Fun fact: It doesn’t work. The fixed element is hidden. Not in an “off the screen” way. Not in an underneath another element way. It’s just hidden or “cut” as it was described on StackOverflow. ¹

The only thing to do is to reorient the elements so that the element that was the relatively positioned parent is now a sibling — which mostly defeats the purpose.

This was the problem I was facing with a Modal element I was working on. I wanted a Modal that’s body was too long for the screen to scroll internally but still have a Close Icon in the top right that a user could hit to close the window.

The original Modal Dialog (the part of the Modal that has content - as opposed to the “mask” which covers the original document) looked something like this:

<ModalStyled {...props}>
  {onClose && <CloseButton onClick={onClose}>X</CloseButton>}
  {children}
</ModalStyled>

The ModalStyled was just a styled div, but the key was that it has position: relative.

This meant that the button could be something like (using styled-components):

import styled from ‘styled-components’
export const CloseButton = styled.button`
  position: absolute;
  top: -18px;
  right: -24px;
`;

If you look at the .gif, however, you’ll notice that when the ModalStyled is made overflow:auto, the button disappears!

The best solution I could come up with was to wrap the whole thing in a div and use flex box to orient it so that my CloseButton would still appear above the Modal, if not slightly off to the top right corner as initially.

<Wrapper>
  <MiniWrapper>
    {onClose && <InternalScrollCloseButton name={closeIcon} onClick={onClose} />}
  </MiniWrapper>
  <ModalStyled {...props}>
    {children}
  </ModalStyled>
</Wrapper

Import styled from ‘styled-components’;

export const Wrapper = styled.div`
  display: flex;
  flex-direction: column;
  max-height: 100%;
  margin: auto;
  overflow: auto;
`;

Export const MiniWrapper = styled.div`
  display: flex;
  Justify-content: flex-end;
`;

Once I had this - I could flip between the two using a prop, internalScroll.

It basically turned into:

export const Dialog = props => {

const { internalScroll, …rest } = props;

return ( internalScroll
  ? (
    <Wrapper>
      <MiniWrapper>
        {onClose && <InternalScrollCloseButton name={closeIcon} onClick={onClose} />}
      </MiniWrapper>
      <ModalStyled {...props}>
        {children}
      </ModalStyled>
    </Wrapper)
  : (
    <ModalStyled {...props}>
      {onClose && <CloseButton onClick={onClose}>X</CloseButton>}
      {children}
    </ModalStyled>)
)};

Is it perfect? Hardly. Does it work and get me most of the way there without a significant amount of additional effort? Barring a generous internet soul divining the answer to me … absolutely.

P.S. I told a friend I’d made a Modal that had an internal scroll. His response? “Wince. Maybe that shouldn’t be a modal then?” Touché. None-the-less, this was my first blush with an interesting quirk of fixed position elements and overflow and I’ll never apologize for an opportunity to learn.

Footnotes

• ¹ css - Absolute positioned div with overflow auto causing child absolute div to be cut off | Stack Overflow