Fixing the Tooltip function in XPages

A colleague noticed that the tooltip function on a Xpage stopped working after submitting the page to the server and when the validation did not pass. The same behaviour occurred when I added a computed text control that would spit out an anchor reference using a tooltip. Odd.

I found an old post of mine where I described the use of the xe:tooltip control. This control seems to keep working even when the XPage fails to validate. So that is a win.

However, in my case I would have to apply the control on many places which does not make me happy.

I also wanted to alter the layout of the tooltip a bit via a template so I found this piece of code. To my delight I noticed that the tooltip also kept working after a failed validation!

So a simple bit of code can fix tooltip again:

So after applying a template for the tooltip and applying some CSS my tooltip looks a bit more readable and less boring:

Note that I have to set the xp:this.title property for the inputTextArea control. Adding an additional attribute for the placeholder won’t do for the template.