jQuery UI Draggable/Sortable - Get reference to new item

Question

I am using the jQuery UI Draggable/Sortable demo (http://jqueryui.com/demos/draggable/#sortable) for the basis of my project. I need to get a reference to the <li> that gets cloned into the sortable when the sortable receives it. I tried the sortable's receive event, but that only gives a reference to the original draggable <li>, and not its clone.

Answer 1

In the demo you reference, there's actually a bug; after you drag an item down it inserts a cloned li with an id which is a duplicate of its brother's into the DOM, so beware (a bug was filed about this but there's no activity around it).

I did a few things to achieve this:

1. To get around the limitation of the demo that I described above, instead apply a class to the draggable items that will be linked to the sortable:

   <ul>
       <li class="new-item ui-state-highlight">Drag me down</li>
   </ul>
   

2. Make items with that class draggable, instead of selecting an element by id:

    $(".new-item").draggable({
        connectToSortable: "#sortable",
        helper: "clone",
        revert: "invalid"
    });
   

3. Tap into the stop event of the sortable, and perform some simple logic about the item that was dropped, leveraging the fact that an item with the class new-item could only have been dropped (and isn't simply an existing item in the sortable):

   $("#sortable").sortable({
       revert: true,
       stop: function(event, ui) {
           if (ui.item.hasClass("new-item")) {
               // This is a new item
               ui.item.removeClass("new-item");
               ui.item.html("<b>HI</b>");
           }
       }
   });
   

Note that you could use the data-* attribute instead of adding a helper class.

Here's a working example: http://jsfiddle.net/andrewwhitaker/twFCu/

Hope that helps.