AngularJS drag ‘n’ drop re-order in ngRepeat

EDIT I’ve just got a github up for this here: https://github.com/SimeonC/ngRepeatReorder. I’ve fixed some of the bugs in the code and updated it to run on the 1.2.x angularjs codebase.

I’ve been busy on some small projects that I’ve been doing recently and a little problem I’ve had to overcome is the difficulty of doing drag ‘n’ drop reorders in an ngRepeat.

After looking around the web I came up with the following solution:

See the Pen AngularJS ngRepeat Drag n Drop by SimeonC (@SimeonC) on CodePen

How It Works

In short this works by starting with the ngRepeat code in angular.js. Which in itself is complex as you have to also copy over a bunch of functions that it uses that are hidden elsewhere in the codebase. Then you add all the lovely complexity of moving elements around – I decided to simplify this by limiting the movement within the list bounds and only do vertical re-ordering. I animate this by fiddling with the margins – creating a gap where the ‘dragged’ element is going to drop into and then using +/- margins to position the dragging element correctly. Also we add in classes for display purposes.

The last hurdle I had to overcome is to modify the ngRepeat element before our modified ngRepeat compiles the element, I did this with a second directive that executes before the ngRepeat and adds the event tags onto the element.