Thursday, April 14th, 2005
Drag n’ Drop in JavaScript
A lot of people ask about drag and drop, and here is a nice set of examples: Direct Manipulation Using JavaScript and CSS.
Direct manipulation, particularly drag and drop, is under utilized in desktop applications and is almost non-existant in web applications. The following examples demonstrate that direct manipulation is possible in modern browsers.
Each example is a proof of concept. I’m answering the question Can I do this? without considering the question Should I do this?. That said, some of these examples are pretty impressive, so it’s nice to think that sometimes the answer will be Yes, you should.
Examples
You can then combine these JavaScript functions with Ajax to make sure that the changes you made are persisted!
http://www.dhtmlcentral.com/ for resize.
Wow, those are some spectacular scripts!
Cool stuff. One thing about the drag n drop lists. It seems like its all client side. How would this help in a real world situation where you need to store the new ordered lists that you just dragged and dropped? It doesn’t communicate with the server at anytime, so you can’t really save that information. Not sure how useful that would be.
I guess you can also set some hidden field values or use Ajax to communiate with the server. Now that would be a neat demo.
What is the possibility of using nested UL lists with sorting? That is something that I would be very interested in.
Have you tried that at all?
Have you ever tried qooxdoo (qooxdoo.sourceforge.net). There is a full drag and drop implementation – but it’s target are web applications – not simple html pages.
I’m currently working on Drag&Drop for XHTML and SVG pages. In particular, I find your examples of sorting lists and slides very good (absolutely high drool factor). The code I wrote so far is able to handle mixed XHTML/SVG documents (compound documents). It can show a selection rectangle with resize handles, and it can be used to move and resize both XHTML and SVG elements, as long as they allow absolute positioning. The code hides differences in XHTML and SVG semantics.
However, currently one important thing for drag&drop is still missing: while it is now possible to handle the drag, it is not possible to detect whether a particular “thing” has been dropped onto a particular other element. Part of the problem is that there is no function to detect what is “under” the cursor and the object being dragged. I would like to see support for this coming from web browsers so writing cross-platform interactive web-applications could become a little more easier…
ceejayoz,
you need to use Ajax for that … im using xajax (PHP) class for my apps – pretty easy to use and powerful
ceejayoz – Cool stuff. One thing about the drag n drop lists. It seems like its all client side. How would this help in a real world situation where you need to store the new ordered lists that you just dragged and dropped?
This IS client-side only. I would save things onunload. It would be possible to save ondragend, but that would require more trips to the server. On the other hand, in a failed use case (browser crash) where a lot of change was made onunload would lose ALL of the changes where as ondragend, only the last change would be lost.
Ramin – What is the possibility of using nested UL lists with sorting?
Definitely possible. Not much added difficulty, either.
You’ll find cooler examples on http://script.aculo.us/ and demos on my own site, too: http://dhtmlkitchen.com/scripts/draglib/demo/
These two scripts have droptargets, animation when dragging is canceled (animation back). Mine also has some keyboard accessibility features to select/deselect multiple objects (so you can drag a few things at a time) and ESC to cancel dragging. Demo: http://dhtmlkitchen.com/scripts/draglib/DragModule/demo/droptarget/
(The PNG doesn’t work in IE6 and I have no intention of using MS’s DXImageTransform “css” property. Let it work in IE7)
Ramin – What is the possibility of using nested UL lists with sorting?
I got it to work here ->
http://dhtmlkitchen.com/scripts/draglib/DragModule/demo/dragpane/nested-list.html
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