Drop Manager

UI / Drop Manager

Associating data with the dragged object
Controlling drop targets
Filtering drop targets
Enabling/Disabling the Drop Manager
CSS
Usage from within Typescript
Library Integrations
Inserting a node between two nodes on edge drop
Working with decorators

A common use case in the sorts of applications for which the Toolkit is useful is the requirement to be able to drag and drop new nodes/groups onto the workspace. Surface widgets already support this concept via the registerDroppableNodes method, but the Drop Manager, an optional new include from version 1.13.1 onwards, offers a more flexible approach to achieving the same goal.

Briefly, the Drop Manager offers:

the ability to drag objects onto the whitespace of the canvas
the ability to drag object onto groups or nodes
the ability to drag objects onto edges
the ability to disable the drag/drop functionality programmatically

Drop Manager replaces the registerDroppableNodes method that used to be present on the Surface component.

The Drop Manager ships in a separate package to the main Toolkit code. If you're using npm to manage your jsPlumb dependencies, you need to add an extra line to package.json:

   "jsplumbtoolkit-drop":"file:path/to/jsplumbtoolkit-drop.tgz"

The Drop Manager is also available in js/jsplumbtoolkit-drop.js in the licensed package.

To import the class you need:

import { jsPlumbToolkitDropManager } from "jsplumbtoolkit-drop"

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new jsPlumbToolkitDropManager({    
    surface:SomeSurfaceWidget,
    source:someHTMLElementContainingDraggableChildren,
    selector:".draggable-child",
    onDrop:function(data, target, draggedElement, event, position) {
        console.log("drop on node or group", arguments);
    },
    onCanvasDrop:function(data, canvasPosition, draggedElement, event, position) {
        console.log("drop on canvas", arguments);    
    },
    onEdgeDrop:function(data, target, draggedElement, event, position) {
        console.log("drop on edge", arguments);
    }   
})

The arguments here are:

surface Required. Identifies the Surface widget with which to interact
source Required. Identifies the DOM element inside which the Drop Manager will find draggable elements
selector Required. Identifies the child elements inside source that are draggable.
onDrop Optional callback to hit when the user drops an element on a node or group
onCanvasDrop Optional callback to hit when the user drops an element on whitespace in the canvas
onEdgeDrop Optional callback to hit when the user drops an element on an edge

In this setup, objects can be dropped on nodes, groups, edges, and the whitespace of the canvas.

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When drag starts, you can generate some data for the Drop Manager to associate with the object being dragged. You do this with a dataGenerator function:

new jsPlumbToolkitDropManager({    
    ...
    dataGenerator:function(el) {
        return {type: el.getAttribute("data-type") }
    },
    ...
})

Our dataGenerator here extracts the value of the data-type attribute on the element being dragged, and returns it in an object. The return value of the dataGenerator is what is passed in as the data argument to the various drop methods.

The signature of the dataGenerator function is:

export type DataGeneratorFunction<T> = (el:HTMLElement) => T;

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You can control which parts of the Surface act as drop targets by only supplying specific callbacks. Here we'll disable everything except dropping on edges, because we've only supplied an onEdgeDrop callback:

new jsPlumbToolkitDropManager({    
    surface:SomeSurfaceWidget,
    source:someHTMLElementContainingDraggableChildren,
    selector:".draggable-child",    
    dataGenerator:function(el) {
        return {type: el.getAttribute("data-type") }
    },
    onEdgeDrop:function(data, target, draggedElement, event, position) {
       console.log("drop on edge", arguments);
    }   
})

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You can use filters to exclude elements at drag time. In this example we'll filter out any node/group that has foo:true in its data:

new jsPlumbToolkitDropManager({    
    surface:SomeSurfaceWidget,
    source:someHTMLElementContainingDraggableChildren,
    selector:".draggable-child",
    dropFilter:function(data, nodeOrGroup) {
        return nodeOrGroup.data.foo !== true;    
    },
    onDrop:function(data, target, draggedElement, event, position) {
        console.log("drop on node or group", arguments);
    }  
})

The method signature for dropFilter is:

export type DropFilter<T> = (data:T, target:Node|Group) => boolean;

It is also possible, when drag starts, to decide whether or not you want the dragged element to be droppable on the canvas:

new jsPlumbToolkitDropManager({    
    surface:SomeSurfaceWidget,
    source:someHTMLElementContainingDraggableChildren,
    selector:".draggable-child",
    canvasDropFilter:function(data) {
        return data.type === "someDroppableOnCanvasType";    
    },
    onDrop:function(data, canvasPosition, draggedElement, event, position) {
        console.log("drop on canvas", arguments);
    }  
})

The method signature for the canvasDropFilter is:

export type CanvasDropFilter<T> = (data:T) => boolean;

And of course you can also filter by edge:

new jsPlumbToolkitDropManager({    
    surface:SomeSurfaceWidget,
    source:someHTMLElementContainingDraggableChildren,
    selector:".draggable-child",
    edgeDropFilter:function(data, edge) {
        return edge.data.foo !== true;    
    },
      ...
})

The method signature for edgeDropFilter is:

export type EdgeDropFilter<T> = (data:T, target:Edge) => boolean;

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You can disable/enable the entire Drop Manager at any time:

dropManager.setEnabled(false);

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There are two CSS classes that are assigned to parts of the UI during the lifecycle of a drag:

name	default	purpose
dragActiveClass	jtk-drag-drop-active	Assigned to any part of the UI that is a target for a drop of the current element
dragHoverClass	jtk-drag-drop-hover	Assigned to any drop target over which the current element is hovering. When the mouse is released the element having this class will be the recipient of an on drop event.

You can provide your own values for these in the Drop Manager constructor:

new jsPlumbToolkitDropManager({
    dragActiveClass:"drag-active",
    dragHoverClass:"you-can-drop-here"
});

In order to use these classes for visual cues in the UI, you'll probably want to define slightly different selectors for each target type. Let's suppose when a drag starts we want to outline our canvas and any nodes/groups with a purple line, and we want to draw any possible target edges with a purple line too:

.jtk-surface.jtk-drag-drop-active, .jtk-node.jtk-drag-drop-active, .jtk-group.jtk-drag-drop-active {
    outline:4px solid purple;
}

svg.jtk-drag-drop-active path {
    stroke:purple;
}

Now when something is the current drop target, we'll either outline it green or make its path green:

.jtk-surface.jtk-drag-drop-hover, .jtk-node.jtk-drag-drop-hover, .jtk-group.jtk-drag-drop-hover {
    outline:4px solid green;
}

svg.jtk-drag-drop-hover path {
    stroke:green;
}

This is just an example of course. You can do anything with the CSS that you like.

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The Drop Manager takes a type parameter T that identifies the type of data that your dataGenerator function is going to return. You'll see the type T listed in various function definitions above; if you are not using Typescript then this type parameter disappears and you don't need to think about it.

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There is a wrapper for the Drop Manager in each of the library integrations.

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This is a use case we are asked about fairly regularly. We provide here an example onEdgeDrop function you can use as a basis.

Note that in this example, we are assuming that an Absolute layout is in use, and so the new node's position will be the left and top values we provide. But other layouts will place the new node where they think it ought to go.

onEdgeDrop:function(data:any, edge:Edge, 
                     draggedElement:HTMLElement, evt:Event, 
                     pageLocation:{left:number, top:number}) {
    
    let positionOnSurface = surface.mapLocation(pageLocation);
    toolkit.addFactoryNode(data.type, data, 
        function(newNode) {
            let currentSource = edge.source; // the current source node/port
            let currentTarget = edge.target; // the target node/port
            toolkit.removeEdge(edge);
            toolkit.addEdge({source:currentSource, target:newNode});
            toolkit.addEdge({source:newNode, target:currentTarget});
            surface.setPosition(newNode, positionOnSurface.left, positionOnSurface.top);
        }
    );
 }

In this example we use the addFactoryNode method to add a new node. This mechanism allows us to generate the data for the new node via our node factory. You could also use addNode(someData) here. We also assume you have a reference to surface - the Surface object you're dropping nodes on - and toolkit, the underlying Toolkit instance.

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If you have any Decorators in your UI, you may wish to inform the drop manager about the elements they have created, because without doing this the drop manager will not be able to recognise them as background. To do this, you use the canvasSelector option:

new jsPlumbToolkitDropManager({    
    surface:SomeSurfaceWidget,
    source:someHTMLElementContainingDraggableChildren,
    selector:".draggable-child",
    canvasSelector:".someElementMyDecoratorCreated",
      ...
})

canvasSelector takes any valid CSS3 selector. This identifies the elements that your decorator has created that the drop manager should treat as background.