How do I make custom scrollbars with jScrollPane to be always visible?

I have scrollbars using the jScrollPane plug-in for jQuery.

The scrollbar works, all content is with AJAX, so for every 'page' load, I add the re-initialization of the scrollbars. But when content is shorter than the page, the scrollbars are not visible.

This results in 10px extra space for the content, and that is a开发者_开发知识库nnoying with items using 100% of the available space.

Anyone an idea how to make the scrollbars visible even when content is not available? Or an alternative CSS way to reserve the space is also fine.

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If nobody finds a better solution,

i can already say that i modified jScrollPane plugin, to always show the "track" bar, and if it was going to hide the scrollbar (because content was smaller than the view) i also not append the 'drag' bar. though its not a very clean option.

it should be taken further, and also disable / re-enable the up down buttons, adding css functionality not to do hover/active state's when its disabled... for better usability.

still looking forward to a possible better solution, though i feel that i will have come up with the only possible solution as there probably is none out of the box

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I think until this feature is added to jScrollPane there are only dirty tricks available to fix this. What I did was to ask jScrollPane if scrolling is enabled; if not, I added a div that looks like an empty/disabled scrollbar. This is the code:

var scrollPane = $("#id-of-scroll-area");
scrollPane.css("height", "100%"); // I needed this; you may not
var scroll = scrollPane.jScrollPane();
// check if scrolling is enabled
if (!scroll.data('jsp').getIsScrollableV()) {
  scrollPane.css("overflow-y", "hidden");
  scrollPane.css("width", leftPane.width() - 10); // 10 is width of scroll bar
  scrollPane.after('<div id="white-v-bar">&nbsp;</div>');   
}

Hop this helps someone... Markus

This is the CSS for the dummy scroll bar:

#white-v-bar {
 height:100%;
 width:10px;
 background-color:white;
 float:left;
}