How to freeze header row of a scrollable table?

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In a dynamically created table, I want to freeze the top row so that it always displays when the table is scrolled. The related piece of code is below. How can the header row get frozen? Thanks.

JavaScript

        function createTable(_records, cellWidth) {
            var _table = document.createElement("TABLE");

            var row = _table.insertRow(-1);
//            row.style.position = 'fixed';
            for (var i = 0; i < _records[0].length; i++) {
                var headerCell = document.createElement("TH");
                headerCell.innerHTML = _records[0][i];
                headerCell.bgColor = '#FFCCFF';     // pale pink
                headerCell.style = 'first-row-style';
                headerCell.style.height = '24px';
                //headerCell.style.position = 'fixed';
                headerCell.style.textAlign = 'center';
                headerCell.style.borderLeft = '.5px solid black';
                row.appendChild(headerCell);
            }
        ....
        }

What I have tried:

How to freeze header row of a scrollable table?

Posted 6-Jul-16 3:54am

s yu

Updated 6-Jul-16 4:21am

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Afzaal Ahmad Zeeshan · Answer 1 · 2016-07-06T04:21:00

The freezing of the headers is done by setting the position property of the element to absolute. This would allow your element to float anywhere, you want it to. Absolute positioning is really very helpful in such scenarios, where you want an element to float on another element such as in the cases of scrolling while keeping the headers (or the column names) in their own position.

position - CSS | MDN[^]
Tryit Editor v3.0[^]

In your case, it would be,

JavaScript

headerCell.style.position = "absolute";

// Rest of the configurations to keep the header on top
headerCell.style.top = "0px";

But sometimes this can be overkill, it means that you should always consider another way around before using this method, read here, html - Is it considered bad practice to use absolute positioning? - Stack Overflow[^].