Use onmousedown to get the ID of the element you just mousedowned on?

Question

Is this possible?

I am attempting to write a function for onmousedown that will return the ID of the element you just clicked for later use in recreating that element in a different div.

Answer 1

You can use event delegation, to basically connect only one event handler to your entire document, and get the element which the event was originally dispatched, using event.target:

document.body.onmousedown = function (e) {
  e = e || window.event;
  var elementId = (e.target || e.srcElement).id;

  // call your re-create function
  recreate(elementId);
  // ...
}

function recreate (id) {
  // you can do the DOM manipulation here.
}

Edit: You can assign events to all your Scriptaculous draggables in this way:

Event.observe(window, 'load', function () {
  Draggables.drags.each(function (item) {
    Event.observe(item.element, 'mousedown', function () {
      alert('mouseDown ' + this.id); // the this variable is the element 
    });                              // which has been "mouse downed"
  });
});

Check an example here.

Answer 2

CMS pretty much has the correct answer but you will need to make it a little more cross browser friendly.

document.body.onmousedown = function (e) {
  // Get IE event object
  e = e || window.event;
  // Get target in W3C browsers & IE
  var elementId = e.target ? e.target.id : e.srcElement.id;
  // ...
}