🚀 A powerful drag and drop implementation in just 16 lines of JavaScript

Drag and drop is a very useful tool in applications as it can simplify a large part of the process for users. It's also a common task we delegate to other libraries which may bloat your app when you just need a very simple implementation when you can use the Drag and Drop Web API. Today, I'll show you how you can do just that!

What we are making

This is the basic implementation we are aiming to build:

That was made in just 16 lines of JavaScript!

And with a few more lines we can add a lot more bonus features! Here's a demo with some more features!

Play around with it, you will see that we can

• Drop elements only in certain places
• Style the element in which we are dropping
• Style the original copy of the dragged element
• (With a little trickery) even style the dragged element!

All this with just 30 lines of code!

It works on almost all desktop browsers with partial support all the way back to IE 6(!) which should be enough for this to work, but it doesn't work on some mobile browsers.

You can see the up-to-date CanIUse data here:

Dealing with libraries for this very basic functionality has been a pain for me, and to save you the trouble I thought I'd document the process here!

HTML structure

Places to drag into

You need some drop targets to be able to drag something into them right? We can add these using regular divs:

<div class='drop'></div>
<div class='drop'></div>
<div class='drop'></div>
<div class='drop'></div>

Note: I'll be referring to the places we can drop into as drop targets in this post

You can add as many of them wherever you like, as long as an element has the drop class we will be able to drop into them.

We can also add some basic styles for them to look nice.

* {
    box-sizing: border-box;
    font-family: sans-serif;
}

.drop {
    width: 220px;
    height: 45px;
    background: #2563EB;
    margin-bottom: 10px;
    padding: 10px;
    border-radius: 3px;
}

The element to drag

For an element to be draggable, we need, well, an element! We can place the element in one of the drop targets we made before. This is how it should look like

<div class='drop'>
    <div id='drag' draggable='true' ondragstart='event.dataTransfer.setData('text/plain', null)'>
        Drag me!
    </div>
</div>
<div class='drop'></div>
<div class='drop'></div>
<div class='drop'></div>

Notice how we also set the draggable attribute to true. Every draggable element needs to have the draggable attribute set for it to be draggable.

Also, not every element can be dragged even if the draggable attribute is set. We need to explicitly say that the element is draggable by listening to the dragstart event in the HTML. There we are setting null as we don't have any data to share and we are setting the data type text/plain.

We can (again) also add some basic styles for them to look nice.

#drag {
    width: 200px;
    height: 25px;
    border-radius: 3px;
    background: black;
    color: white;
    display: grid;
    align-items: center;
    justify-content: center;
}

Note that as long as an element has the draggable attribute set to true and the drop targets have the drop class, the below code should work everywhere

The minimal implementation

For our drag and drop to be functional, we just need 3 different event listeners. Everything else is a bonus.

First, we need to store the element we are dragging. We can do this by listening to the dragstart event.

let dragged;

document.addEventListener('dragstart', event => {
    dragged = event.target;
}, false)

Whenever an element is dragged, this will store the dragged element in a variable.

Next, we can listen to drop events so we can drop elements.

document.addEventListener('drop', event => {
    // Prevent default behaviour (sometimes opening a link)
    event.preventDefault();

    if (event.target.className === 'drop') {
        dragged.parentNode.removeChild(dragged);
        event.target.appendChild(dragged);
    }
}, false)

Whenever we drop an element, if the element is a drop target (has the drop class) we will append the dragged element to the drop target.

We're almost done, but we need to do one more thing to make this work.

By default, dragging elements does nothing, so to prevent the default behavior we need to call event.preventDefault whenever we drag over the drop target.

This is easy to achieve with a oneliner:

document.addEventListener('dragover', event => event.preventDefault(), false);

That's it! In 16 lines we have functional drag and drop!

Here's a video of it in action:

Adding more features

Even if this drag and drop works, it's not very nice. It doesn't seem very "natural". Luckily, in a few lines of code, we can make this drag and drop even better!

Styling the original dragged element

Whenever we drag an element, the original copy of the element doesn't change its style. It would look better if we could add a different style to these dragged elements, like making them transparent to show that it is being dragged.

This is very easy to do. Just add the styles in the dragstart event listener.

document.addEventListener('dragstart', event => {
    // ...

    event.target.style.opacity = 0.5;
    // add more styles as you like...

    // ...
});

But we also need to reset the style once we finish dragging. We can do that by listening to dragend:

document.addeventListener('dragend', event => event.target.style.opacity = '', false)

Styling the drop targets

We can also style the drop target by listening to the dragenter event:

document.addEventListener('dragenter', event => {
    if (event.target.className === 'drop') event.target.style.background = '#2c41cc';
}, false)

Once again, we need to reset the styles once we leave the element. We can do that by listening to dragleave:

document.addEventListener('dragleave', event => {
    if (event.target.className === 'drop') event.target.style.background = '';
}, false)

We also need to reset the styles once we drop the event. We can edit the drop event to achieve this.

document.addEventListener('drop', event => {
    // ...

    if (event.target.className === 'drop') {
        event.target.style.background = '';
    //...
})

Styling the dragged copy

With a bit of trickery, we can style the dragged copy too! Maybe we can rotate the element a bit to make it a bit more natural.

We can do this by styling the original copy and immediately undoing those styles in the dragstart event so that the users don't see it.

listen('dragstart', event => {
    // ...

    event.target.style.transform = 'rotate(-2deg)';
    setTimeout(() => event.target.style.transform = '', 1);
})

Now the dragged copy will appear to be rotated when we are dragging it!

You now have a fully functioning drag and drop implementation!

Here's a video of it in action:

Here's a Gist with all the source code for reference

Conclusion

We took a task for which we very commonly delegate to libraries and implemented it ourselves, with surprisingly little code.

I hope this opens your eyes to how much you can do with just vanilla JS. You don't need libraries every time.

Have you ever tried implementing drag and drop on your own? Share in the comments!