React show Material-UI Tooltip only for text that has ellipsis

based on benjamin.keen answer, this is the functional version of his code:

import React, { useRef, useState, useEffect } from 'react';
import Tooltip from '@material-ui/core/Tooltip';

const OverflowTip = ({ children }) => {
  const [isOverflowed, setIsOverflow] = useState(false);
  const textElementRef = useRef();
  useEffect(() => {
    setIsOverflow(textElementRef.current.scrollWidth > textElementRef.current.clientWidth);
  }, []);
  return (
    <Tooltip title={children} disableHoverListener={!isOverflowed}>
      <div
        ref={textElementRef}
        style={{
          whiteSpace: 'nowrap',
          overflow: 'hidden',
          textOverflow: 'ellipsis',
        }}
      >
        {children}
      </div>
    </Tooltip>
  );
};

To go off of @benjamin.keen answer. Here is a standalone functional component which is just an extension of his answer using hooks to perform the comparison functions.

import React, { useRef, useEffect, useState } from 'react';
import Tooltip from '@material-ui/core/Tooltip';
const OverflowTip = props => {
  // Create Ref
  const textElementRef = useRef();

  const compareSize = () => {
    const compare =
      textElementRef.current.scrollWidth > textElementRef.current.clientWidth;
    console.log('compare: ', compare);
    setHover(compare);
  };

  // compare once and add resize listener on "componentDidMount"
  useEffect(() => {
    compareSize();
    window.addEventListener('resize', compareSize);
  }, []);

  // remove resize listener again on "componentWillUnmount"
  useEffect(() => () => {
    window.removeEventListener('resize', compareSize);
  }, []);

  // Define state and function to update the value
  const [hoverStatus, setHover] = useState(false);

  return (
    <Tooltip
      title={props.value}
      interactive
      disableHoverListener={!hoverStatus}
      style={{fontSize: '2em'}}
    >
      <div
        ref={textElementRef}
        style={{
          whiteSpace: 'nowrap',
          overflow: 'hidden',
          textOverflow: 'ellipsis'
        }}
      >
        {props.someLongText}
      </div>
    </Tooltip>
  );
};

export default OverflowTip;

Please find the codesandbox below - https://codesandbox.io/s/material-demo-p2omr

I am using ref here to get the TableCell DOM Node and then comparing the scrollWidth and clientWidth to determine if Tooltip has to be displayed.(This is based on answer here)

I have added "rowref" (property that has the ref) and "open" (disable/enable tooltip) as new properties to the rows. I don't know where your data is coming from, but I am assuming you can add these properties to the row.

One more thing to note, I am only setting "disableHoverListener" prop to disable tooltip . There are other props - "disableFocusListener" & "disableTouchListener" , If you want to use those. More info here

Hope this works out for you. Let me know if you have any doubts in the code.


I ran into this same problem today and @vijay-menon's answer was very helpful. Here's a simple standalone component for the same thing:

import React, { Component } from 'react';
import Tooltip from '@material-ui/core/Tooltip';

class OverflowTip extends Component {
    constructor(props) {
        super(props);
        this.state = {
            overflowed: false
        };
        this.textElement = React.createRef();
    }

    componentDidMount () {
        this.setState({
            isOverflowed: this.textElement.current.scrollWidth > this.textElement.current.clientWidth
        });
    }

    render () {
        const { isOverflowed } = this.state;
        return (
            <Tooltip
                title={this.props.children}
                disableHoverListener={!isOverflowed}>
                <div
                    ref={this.textElement}
                    style={{
                        whiteSpace: 'nowrap',
                        overflow: 'hidden',
                        textOverflow: 'ellipsis'
                    }}>
                    {this.props.children}
                </div>
            </Tooltip>
        );
    }
}

Example usage:

<OverflowTip>
      some long text here that may get truncated based on space
</OverflowTip>

The one nuisance is that if the space for the element dynamically changes in the page (e.g. page resize or dynamic DOM change) it won't acknowledge the new space and recompute whether it's overflowed.

Other tooltip libraries like Tippy have a method that's fired when trying to open the tooltip. That's a perfect place to do the overflow check because it'll always work, regardless if the DOM width had changed for the text element. Unfortunately it's fussier to do that with the API provided by Material UI.