Question

I’ve worked thru the various jquery UI demos of drag and drop and sortable. These show how to get items from one list to another. One example even shows a shopping cart demo.

Am I missing something in that a

item won’t be part of a post to the server right? so what use is this other than reorganizing a display on a page?

Is it possible to adapt this to some sort of input field?

TIA
J

Answer 1

item won’t be part of a post to the server right? so what use is this
other than reorganizing a display on a page?

Allowing users to reorganize the elements in the page is a nice feature, even if you aren’t notified on the server. For example, by allowing users to drag and drop elements, you may store his current page layout in localStorage so that the next time the user visits your page, the layout is restored automatically. You don’t need to be notified on the server side what the user preferences are.

All of these jQuery plugins (sortable, draggable, etc.) have functions that you can hook into and trigger some server side processing as well. For example, when a user drags and drops an element from one section of the screen to another, you can perfectly make an ajax request and do some processing on your end. This would provide a very nice user experience to the user.

For example:

$( ".selector" ).droppable({
    drop: function( event, ui ) {
       $.post('http://server/somection',data{...});//do something on the server-side
    };
});

Absolutely! jsfiddle with demo here.