JQuery UI Draggable/Sortable – Get reference to new item

jqueryjquery-uijquery-ui-draggablejquery-ui-sortable

I am using the jQuery UI Draggable/Sortable demo (http://jqueryui.com/demos/draggable/#sortable) for the basis of my project. I need to get a reference to the <li> that gets cloned into the sortable when the sortable receives it. I tried the sortable's receive event, but that only gives a reference to the original draggable <li>, and not its clone.

Best Answer

In the demo you reference, there's actually a bug; after you drag an item down it inserts a cloned li with an id which is a duplicate of its brother's into the DOM, so beware (a bug was filed about this but there's no activity around it).

I did a few things to achieve this:

  1. To get around the limitation of the demo that I described above, instead apply a class to the draggable items that will be linked to the sortable:

    <ul>
    <li class="new-item ui-state-highlight">Drag me down</li>
</ul>

  2. Make items with that class draggable, instead of selecting an element by id:

     $(".new-item").draggable({
     connectToSortable: "#sortable",
     helper: "clone",
     revert: "invalid"
 });

  3. Tap into the stop event of the sortable, and perform some simple logic about the item that was dropped, leveraging the fact that an item with the class new-item could only have been dropped (and isn't simply an existing item in the sortable):

    $("#sortable").sortable({
    revert: true,
    stop: function(event, ui) {
        if (ui.item.hasClass("new-item")) {
            // This is a new item
            ui.item.removeClass("new-item");
            ui.item.html("<b>HI</b>");
        }
    }
});

Note that you could use the data-* attribute instead of adding a helper class.

Here's a working example: http://jsfiddle.net/andrewwhitaker/twFCu/

Hope that helps.

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