Reorder HTML table rows using drag-and-drop

Question

I have a jQuery function to move table rows up and down. I do not know how to save the data, nor get the position of each row. I am using PHP to show the table rows.

How

Answer 1

The jQuery UI sortable plugin provides drag-and-drop reordering. A save button can extract the IDs of each item to create a comma-delimited string of those IDs, added to a hidden textbox. The textbox is returned to the server using an async postback.

This fiddle example reorders table elements, but does not save them to a database.

The sortable plugin takes one line of code to turn any list into a sortable list. If you care to use them, it also provides CSS and images to provide a visual impact to sortable list (see the example that I linked to). Developers, however, must provide code to retrieve items in their new order. I embed unique IDs of each item in the list as an HTML attribute and then retrieve those IDs via jQuery.

For example:

// ----- code executed when the document loads
$(function() {
    wireReorderList();
});

function wireReorderList() {
    $("#reorderExampleItems").sortable();
    $("#reorderExampleItems").disableSelection();
}

function saveOrderClick() {
    // ----- Retrieve the li items inside our sortable list
    var items = $("#reorderExampleItems li");

    var linkIDs = [items.size()];
    var index = 0;

    // ----- Iterate through each li, extracting the ID embedded as an attribute
    items.each(
        function(intIndex) {
            linkIDs[index] = $(this).attr("ExampleItemID");
            index++;
        });

    $get("<%=txtExampleItemsOrder.ClientID %>").value = linkIDs.join(",");
}