ASP.net AJAX Drag/Drop?

Question

Hello,

I wonder if someone knows if there is a pre-made solution for this: I have a List on an ASP.net Website, and I want that the User is able to re-sort the list through Drag and Drop. Additionally, I would love to have a second list to which the user can drag items from the first list onto.

So far, I found two solutions:

• The ReorderList from the Ajax Control Toolkit, which requires a bit of manual work to make sure changes are persisted into the database, and that does not support drag/drop between lists.
• The RadGrid from Telerik which does all I want, but is priced far far beyond my Budget.

Does anyone else have some ideas or at least some keywords/pointers to do further investigation on? Espectially the Drag/Drop between two lists is something I am rather clueless about how to do that in ASP.net.

Target Framework is 3.0 by the way.

Answer 1

This is just personal opinion, but the problem I find with ready-made controls in cases like this is that they are extremely bloated, because they're trying to fit everybody's purpose. If all you need is a sortable list then a simple Scriptaculous list or jQuery list with a quick WebMethod callback should fit the bill quite nicely, and you can obviously stick this into your own user control.

As I say, just my opinion, but I wouldn't go spending money on something that's going to add tons of overhead to my page, when I could spend (literally) 10 minutes writing one for free.

Answer 2

I've evaluated the Telerik grid as well as Infragistics version. In the end we took an approach similar to what tags2k suggested. We just wrote our own javascript and called .Net PageMethods to do the server side work.

We found both of the "out of the box" solutions to be bloated. Unless you put paging in at like 20 records per row they really stunk performance wise.

Answer 3

Thanks. My "problem" is that I do not have enough experience in JavaScript and "Client-Side ASP.net communication", hence I was looking for a premade solutions. Infragistics has the same "problem" as Telerik: A nice product, but priced beyond my reach.

I'll have a look at building my own from scratch using the information you provided, many thanks so far!

Answer 4

The Mootools sortables plugin does just that, and best of all, it's free ;)

http://demos.mootools.net/Sortables

Answer 5

Checkout Raj Kaimal's ajax control extender:

http://weblogs.asp.net/rajbk/archive/2007/06/13/the-gridview-row-drag-overlay-extender.aspx

It works like a charm.