[Hut] under the [Sky].[Net]

Long time ago, I was trying to figure out how to change position of items in a list. Let’s say there’s a list of product in an e-commerce solution and the user wants to choose what items go first and what go last. What I used back then was to create a simple form which called a function that takes the id of the previous or next item and swaps it for the current item’s id and vice versa. It was simple, but it worked. But now I needed something more user-friendly, after all it’s true that this solution was not very convenient for long lists. This is where the motto of jQuery “write less, do more” comes handy.

See demo here.

First, you need a table containing the items:

Now download jQuery and the Table Drag and Drop plugin (if you are new to jQuery, there’s great documentation on their page).

Having installed jQuery file and the TableDnD plugin, we need to get things working. Include this in the head section of the website:

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Today, I got feedback about a bug in an application in which I did some minor alterations not long ago. The application gives several rather long lists containing names and as it was often quite difficult to tell which list you are viewing after scrolling down a little bit, I was asked to do something about it. There was no easier way than to show only the first ten names of each list and put the rest in a hidden container, which is shown with help of a “show more” link.

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