How can I get an absolutely-positioned div to extend outside its relativley-positioned parent, which has overflow: auto?

Question

I have a relatively -positioned div, which has overflow: auto set. Inside that, I have a div which acts as a sort of drop-down menu. I want the drop-down div to e

Answer 1

Your problem is the position:relative parent. Since you have that positioning on the element, the inner box will ALWAYS stay within the overflow (position:absolute is relative to the nearest positioned parent).

To avoid the issue, you can remove the "position:relative" from the outer div, and add a wrapper div with the "position:relative;". You'll have to then add the "top:0;" declaration to your inner div (you should always have that, actually).

The end result is one extra div, and it looks like this: (you can remove the "z-index:-1" style, I just added that so you can see the result better)

<div style="position:relative;border:1px solid blue;">
    <div style="height: 100px; width: 100px; background: red; overflow: auto;">
        if there is some really long content here, it will cause overflow, but the green box will not
        <div style="position:absolute; z-index:-1; left: 20px; top:0; height: 200px; width: 200px; background: green;">
        </div>
    </div>
</div>

Answer 2

I am not sure how to achieve what I want.

Neither am I — more info on what you want?

Perhaps it would be a good idea to separate the element with overflow from the element with ‘position: relative’, especially if that's only being used to locate the absolute inside.

<div style="position: relative;">
    <div style="height: 100px; width: 100px; background: red; overflow: auto;">...</div>
    <div style="position: absolute; top: 20px; left: 20px; height: 100px; width: 100px; background: green;">...</div>
</div>