JQuery ui.draggable – changing the current dragged object (in fullCalendar)

clonedraggablejquery-ui

I've just discovered the fullCalendar jQuery plugin which does pretty much everything I need for the appointment scheduling service I'm building. However, I've hit a small problem.

There are "event" elements within fullCalendar agendaDay view which are draggable, however they are locked to the tds of available timeslots. I want to preserve this snapping to the timeslots, but also make it possible to drag the event totally outside of the calendar (this is a behaviour requirement from an older version of the system).

My idea was to make a clone of the object on a mouseout event for the calendar table; this works, but then the user must click and drag the clone seperately from the original object, rather than the clone taking over being dragged.

I need to transfer the "I'm being dragged" status to the clone once the user tries to drag the "event" element outside the table. Is this somehow possible? Is there perhaps an easier solution I could use?

Here is my code which does the cloning. eventDragStart is a "triggered action" called when a user starts to drag an event about (http://arshaw.com/fullcalendar/docs/triggered-actions.php), in which $(this) is set to the event element, event is the calEvent (the actual data item – not relevant here), js is the javascript event (where I get the coordinates), an ui is the ui object reference. ".fc" is the calendar, "#display_box" is the parent element containing this part of the interface. (BTW the positioning doesn't work right yet, but that's kind of a secondary priority right now).

...
eventDragStart: function (event, js, ui) $\{   
var eventElement = $(this);
 $(".fc").mouseout(function () {
  eventElement.clone().css({'z-index':99999, top:js.clientY, right:js.clientX).appendTo("#display_box").draggable({helper: 'original'}); 
  $(".fc").unbind("mouseout");
 });
},
....

I hope this is clear to anyone who hasn't used fullCalendar. I'd really appreciate any help, and sorry it's so long.

Best Answer

Well i think youll want to use eventElement.clone(true) passing that boolean true as an argument is going to clone all the attached events/handlers for the element, where as not passing is only going to clone the dome element wrapped in jQ.

Native deep cloning

It's called "structured cloning", works experimentally in Node 11 and later, and hopefully will land in browsers. See this answer for more details.

Fast cloning with data loss - JSON.parse/stringify

If you do not use Dates, functions, undefined, Infinity, RegExps, Maps, Sets, Blobs, FileLists, ImageDatas, sparse Arrays, Typed Arrays or other complex types within your object, a very simple one liner to deep clone an object is:

JSON.parse(JSON.stringify(object))

const a = {
  string: 'string',
  number: 123,
  bool: false,
  nul: null,
  date: new Date(),  // stringified
  undef: undefined,  // lost
  inf: Infinity,  // forced to 'null'
  re: /.*/,  // lost
}
console.log(a);
console.log(typeof a.date);  // Date object
const clone = JSON.parse(JSON.stringify(a));
console.log(clone);
console.log(typeof clone.date);  // result of .toISOString()

See Corban's answer for benchmarks.

Reliable cloning using a library

Since cloning objects is not trivial (complex types, circular references, function etc.), most major libraries provide function to clone objects. Don't reinvent the wheel - if you're already using a library, check if it has an object cloning function. For example,

lodash - cloneDeep; can be imported separately via the lodash.clonedeep module and is probably your best choice if you're not already using a library that provides a deep cloning function
AngularJS - angular.copy
jQuery - jQuery.extend(true, { }, oldObject); .clone() only clones DOM elements
just library - just-clone; Part of a library of zero-dependency npm modules that do just do one thing. Guilt-free utilities for every occasion.

ES6 (shallow copy)

For completeness, note that ES6 offers two shallow copy mechanisms: Object.assign() and the spread syntax. which copies values of all enumerable own properties from one object to another. For example:

var A1 = {a: "2"};
var A2 = Object.assign({}, A1);
var A3 = {...A1};  // Spread Syntax

Html – How to remove close button on the jQuery UI dialog

I have found this worked in the end (note the third line overriding the open function which find the button and hides it):

$("#div2").dialog({
    closeOnEscape: false,
    open: function(event, ui) {
        $(".ui-dialog-titlebar-close", ui.dialog || ui).hide();
    }
});

To hide the close button on all dialogs you can use the following CSS too:

.ui-dialog-titlebar-close {
    visibility: hidden;
}

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Javascript – the most efficient way to deep clone an object in JavaScript

Native deep cloning

Fast cloning with data loss - JSON.parse/stringify

Reliable cloning using a library

ES6 (shallow copy)

Html – How to remove close button on the jQuery UI dialog

Related Topic