HTML Drag And Drop On Mobile Devices

Question

When you add drag and drop to a web page using JavaScript, such as jQuery UI draggable and droppable, how do you get this to work when viewed via a browser on a mobile device - where the touch-screen actions for dragging are intercepted by the phone for scrolling around the page etc?

All solutions welcome... my initial thoughts are:

1. Have a button for mobile devices that "lifts" the item to be dragged and then get them to click the zone they want to drop the item on.

2. Write an app that does this for mobile devices rather then try and get the web page to work on them!

3. Your suggestions and comments please.

UPDATE: Bounty

If someone can tell me how to make drag and drop work in a web page on a mobile device, without resorting to points 1 and 2 above, I will swing a wonderful bounty of 50 rep your way!

Answer 1

There is a new polyfill for translating touch events to drag-and-drop, such that HTML5 Drag And Drop is utilizable on mobile.

The polyfill was introduced by Bernardo Castilho on this post.

Here's a demo from that post.

The post also presents several considerations of the folyfill design.

Answer 2

You might as well give a try to Tim Ruffle's drag-n-drop polyfill, certainly similar to Bernardo Castilho's one (see @remdevtec answer).

Simply do npm install mobile-drag-drop --save (other installation methods available, e.g. with bower)

Then, any element interface relying on touch detection should work on mobile (e.g. dragging only an element, instead of scrolling + dragging at the same time).

Answer 3

I needed to create a drag and drop + rotation that works on desktop, mobile, tablet including windows phone. The last one made it more complicated (mspointer vs. touch events).

The solution came from The great Greensock library

It took some jumping through hoops to make the same object draggable and rotatable but it works perfectly

Answer 4

here is my solution:

$(el).on('touchstart', function(e) {
    var link = $(e.target.parentNode).closest('a')  
    if(link.length > 0) {
        window.location.href = link.attr('href');
    }
});

Answer 5

jQuery UI Touch Punch just solves it all.

It's a Touch Event Support for jQuery UI. Basically, it just wires touch event back to jQuery UI. Tested on iPad, iPhone, Android and other touch-enabled mobile devices. I used jQuery UI sortable and it works like a charm.

http://touchpunch.furf.com/

Answer 6

Jquery Touch Punch is great but what it also does is disable all the controls on the draggable div so to prevent this you have to alter the lines... (at the time of writing - line 75)

change

if (touchHandled || !self._mouseCapture(event.originalEvent.changedTouches[0])){

to read

if (touchHandled || !self._mouseCapture(event.originalEvent.changedTouches[0]) || event.originalEvent.target.localName === 'textarea'
        || event.originalEvent.target.localName === 'input' || event.originalEvent.target.localName === 'button' || event.originalEvent.target.localName === 'li'
        || event.originalEvent.target.localName === 'a'
        || event.originalEvent.target.localName === 'select' || event.originalEvent.target.localName === 'img') {

add as many ors as you want for each of the elements you want to 'unlock'

Hope that helps someone