Question

Overview

I have the following HTML structure and I’ve attached the dragenter and dragleave events to the <div id="dropzone"> element.

<div id="dropzone">
    <div id="dropzone-content">
        <div id="drag-n-drop">
            <div class="text">this is some text</div>
            <div class="text">this is a container with text and images</div>
        </div>
    </div>
</div>

Problem

When I drag a file over the <div id="dropzone">, the dragenter event is fired as expected. However, when I move my mouse over a child element, such as <div id="drag-n-drop">, the dragenter event is fired for the <div id="drag-n-drop"> element and then the dragleave event is fired for the <div id="dropzone"> element.

If I hover over the <div id="dropzone"> element again, the dragenter event is again fired, which is cool, but then the dragleave event is fired for the child element just left, so the removeClass instruction is executed, which is not cool.

This behavior is problematic for 2 reasons:

1. I’m only attaching dragenter & dragleave to the <div id="dropzone"> so I don’t understand why the children elements have these events attached as well.

2. I’m still dragging over the <div id="dropzone"> element while hovering over its children so I don’t want dragleave to fire!

jsFiddle

Here’s a jsFiddle to tinker with: http://jsfiddle.net/yYF3S/2/

Question

So… how can I make it such that when I’m dragging a file over the <div id="dropzone"> element, dragleave doesn’t fire even if I’m dragging over any children elements… it should only fire when I leave the <div id="dropzone"> element… hovering/dragging around anywhere within the boundaries of the element should not trigger the dragleave event.

I need this to be cross-browser compatible, at least in the browsers that support HTML5 drag-n-drop, so this answer is not adequate.

It seems like Google and Dropbox have figured this out, but their source code is minified/complex so I haven’t been able to figure this out from their implementation.

Answer 1

I finally found a solution I’m happy with. I actually found several ways to do what I want but none were as successful as the current solution… in one solution, I experienced frequent flickering as a result of adding/removing a border to the #dropzone element… in another, the border was never removed if you hover away from the browser.

Anyway, my best hacky solution is this:

var dragging = 0;

attachEvent(window, 'dragenter', function(event) {

    dragging++;
    $(dropzone).addClass('drag-n-drop-hover');

    event.stopPropagation();
    event.preventDefault();
    return false;
});

attachEvent(window, 'dragover', function(event) {

    $(dropzone).addClass('drag-n-drop-hover');

    event.stopPropagation();
    event.preventDefault();
    return false;
});

attachEvent(window, 'dragleave', function(event) {

    dragging--;
    if (dragging === 0) {
        $(dropzone).removeClass('drag-n-drop-hover');
    }

    event.stopPropagation();
    event.preventDefault();
    return false;
});

This works pretty well but issues came up in Firefox because Firefox was double-invoking dragenter so my counter was off. But nevertheless, its not a very elegant solution.

Then I stumbled upon this question: How to detect the dragleave event in Firefox when dragging outside the window

So I took the answer and applied it to my situation:

$.fn.dndhover = function(options) {

    return this.each(function() {

        var self = $(this);
        var collection = $();

        self.on('dragenter', function(event) {
            if (collection.size() === 0) {
                self.trigger('dndHoverStart');
            }
            collection = collection.add(event.target);
        });

        self.on('dragleave', function(event) {
            /*
             * Firefox 3.6 fires the dragleave event on the previous element
             * before firing dragenter on the next one so we introduce a delay
             */
            setTimeout(function() {
                collection = collection.not(event.target);
                if (collection.size() === 0) {
                    self.trigger('dndHoverEnd');
                }
            }, 1);
        });
    });
};

$('#dropzone').dndhover().on({
    'dndHoverStart': function(event) {

        $('#dropzone').addClass('drag-n-drop-hover');

        event.stopPropagation();
        event.preventDefault();
        return false;
    },
    'dndHoverEnd': function(event) {

        $('#dropzone').removeClass('drag-n-drop-hover');

        event.stopPropagation();
        event.preventDefault();
        return false;
    }
});

This is clean and elegant and seems to be working in every browser I’ve tested so far (haven’t tested IE yet).