By Joshua Bemenderfer
Sortable lists are on of the more frustrating parts of web development. The web wasn’t originally created with drag-and-drop in mind, and even with the addition of native drag-and-drop support in HTML5, there’s still quite a bit to hook up. With Vue.Draggable however, this becomes a cinch. It makes most of the decisions for you and leaves a simple, clean API for your benefit.
Install Vue.Draggable from NPM or Yarn:
# Yarn
$ yarn add vuedraggable
# NPM
$ npm install vuedraggable --save
Now, any component can import the draggable component from vuedraggable.
To make a list sortable, just wrap any element in a draggable component (usually with a v-for, but you can do individual elements as well.)
draggable can also take a v-model binding to update an array that contains the relevant data.
<template>
<div>
<h2>Draggable Wrapper</h2>
<draggable v-model="exampleList">
<div v-for="text in exampleList" :key="text">{{text}}</div>
</draggable>
</div>
</template>
<script>
import draggable from 'vuedraggable';
export default {
components: {
draggable
},
data() {
return {
exampleList: [
'Item 1',
'Item 2',
'Item 3',
'Item 4',
'Item 5'
]
}
}
}
</script>
Voilà! The list is sortable! You can drag and drop list items around however you’d like and the changes will be reflected in the array.
Props:
Events: start, add, remove, update, end, choose, sort, filter, clone. Reference
When using Vue.Draggable with Vuex, use a computed property for your array that retrieves the array from the store via a getter, and commits a mutation when set:
computed: {
exampleList: {
get() {
return this.$store.state.exampleList
},
set(val) {
this.$store.commit('setExampleList', val)
}
}
}
That’s all there is to it!
Now, I added home-spun drag-and-drop functionality to a couple personal projects. I’m going to go replace those shoddy implementations with Vue.Draggable now. Adiós!
Thanks for learning with the DigitalOcean Community. Check out our offerings for compute, storage, networking, and managed databases.
This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.
You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!
Get paid to write technical tutorials and select a tech-focused charity to receive a matching donation.
Full documentation for every DigitalOcean product.
The Wave has everything you need to know about building a business, from raising funding to marketing your product.
Stay up to date by signing up for DigitalOcean’s Infrastructure as a Newsletter.
New accounts only. By submitting your email you agree to our Privacy Policy
Scale up as you grow — whether you're running one virtual machine or ten thousand.
Sign up and get $200 in credit for your first 60 days with DigitalOcean.*
*This promotional offer applies to new accounts only.