Stock Chart - Formatted Tooltip And Prefixes or Suffixes Not Showing - highcharts

Question

I am using a stock chart to show trend data. On the backend I am getting what the valueSuffix should be (or valuePrefix as the case may be). I am also formatting the date display in the tooltip. Here is the important part of the series declaration:
...
name: 'Wages',
tooltip: {
valuePrefix: '$',
valueDecimals: 0
},
...
Here is the tooltip formatter:
...
tooltip: {
formatter: function () {
var s = '<b>';
if (Highcharts.dateFormat('%b', this.x) == 'Jan') {
s = s + 'Q1';
}
if (Highcharts.dateFormat('%b', this.x) == 'Apr') {
s = s + 'Q2';
}
if (Highcharts.dateFormat('%b', this.x) == 'Jul') {
s = s + 'Q3';
}
if (Highcharts.dateFormat('%b', this.x) == 'Oct') {
s = s + 'Q4';
}
s = s + ' ' + Highcharts.dateFormat('%Y', this.x) + '</b>';
$.each(this.points, function (i, point) {
s += '<br/><span style="color: ' + point.series.color + '">' + point.series.name + ':</span>' + point.y;
});
return s;
}
}
...
Example jsFiddle.
If you notice the prefix for the dollar sign is not showing on the Wage series. I am not really sure what I am missing here.

Answer 1

The fix is to break up the label formatting and the value formatting into distinct sections. See example jsFiddle.
Set the chart.tooltip like:
...
tooltip: {
headerFormat: '<b>{point.key}</b><br>',
xDateFormat: '%Q'
},
...
On the xAxis I replaced the label formatter with:
...
format: '{value: %Q}'
...
Inside the series I kept my suffix/prefix/decimals the same:
...
tooltip: {
valuePrefix: '$',
valueDecimals: 0
},
...
The big change came when I found that you can set your own date format label. I created one for Quarters (which is what I did the original cumbersome code for):
Highcharts.dateFormats = {
Q: function (timestamp) {
var date = new Date(timestamp);
var y = date.getFullYear();
var m = date.getMonth() + 1;
if (m <= 3) str = "Q1 " + y;
else if (m <= 6) str = "Q2 " + y;
else if (m <= 9) str = "Q3 " + y;
else str = "Q4 " + y;
return str;
}
};
I now get the tooltip to show the correct labels.

Answer 2

Unless something has changed in a recent version, you can't set your tooltip options within the series object. You can set anything that you would set in the plotOptions on the series level, but not the tooltip.
You can set a check within your main tooltip formatter to check for the series name, and apply the prefix accordingly.
{{edit::
This appears to be an issue of the formatter negating the valuePrefix setting.

Answer 3

Old question... but I spent hours looking for an acceptable way to do this.
/!\ : Before OP's answer...
If someone is looking for a way to use the formatter provided by highcharts (pointFormat attribute) (Doc here: LABELS AND STRING FORMATTING), you will find a (bad) example here :
http://jsfiddle.net/gh/get/jquery/1.7.2/highslide-software/highcharts.com/tree/master/samples/highcharts/tooltip/pointformat/
Why "bad" ? because if you change :
pointFormat: '{series.name}: <b>{point.y}</b><br/>',
with :
pointFormat: '{series.name}: <b>{point.y:,.1f}</b><br/>',
you add thousand separators (useless here) and force number format to 1 decimal ... and loose the suffix.
The answer is : series.options.tooltip.valueSuffix (or series.options.tooltip.valuePrefix)
Example :
pointFormat: '<span style="color:{series.color}">\u25CF</span> {series.name}: <b>{point.y:,.0f}{series.options.tooltip.valueSuffix}</b><br/>',
Hope this will save you some time.
Now OP's Answer :
Based on what I said, you can change :
$.each(this.points, function (i, point) {
s += '<br/><span style="color: ' + point.series.color + '">' + point.series.name + ':</span>' + point.y;
});
For this :
$.each(this.points, function (i, point) {
s += '<br/><span style="color: ' + point.series.color + '">'
+ point.series.name + ':</span>'
+ (typeof point.series.options.tooltip.valuePrefix !== "undefined" ?
point.series.options.tooltip.valuePrefix : '')
+ point.y
+ (typeof point.series.options.tooltip.valueSuffix !== "undefined" ?
point.series.options.tooltip.valueSuffix : '');
});
This will add prefix and/or suffix if they exists