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.

Answer 1

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 2

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 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