Stephen A. Fuqua (SAF) is a Bahá'í, software developer, and conservation and interfaith advocate in the DFW area of Texas.

Manipulating Table Rows with jQuery

July 11, 2012

Problem: need to move rows up and down, and from one table to another, in an HTML page.

Solution: careful use of jQuery. There are probably many different solutions already out there, but I wanted to learn how to write one for myself. Key functions: closest, detach, append, prev, next, before, and after.

Demonstration

Table 1
One Two Three
R1 C1 R1 C2 Move Me | Up | Down
R2 C1 R2 C2 Move Me | Up | Down
R3 C1 R3 C2 Move Me | Up | Down
Table 2
One Two Three

Table Source Code

A couple of very basic tables, with "action" links in the third column. Judicious use of id and class attributes will turn out to be very helpful…

<table id="table1" style="background-color: Lime" class="displayTable">
      <caption>Table 1</caption>
      <thead>
          <tr>
              <th>One</th>
              <th>Two</th>
              <th>Three</th>
          </tr>
      </thead>
      <tbody>
          <tr id="row1">
              <td>R1 C1</td>
              <td>R1 C2</td>
              <td>
                  <a href="#" id="row1Link" class="rowLink">Move Me</a> |
                  <a href="#" id="row1Up" class="rowUp">Up</a> | 
                  <a href="#" id="row1Down" class="rowDown">Down</a>
              </td>
          </tr>
          <tr id="row2">
              <td>R2 C1</td>
              <td>R2 C2</td>
              <td>
                  <a href="#" id="row2Link" class="rowLink">Move Me</a> |
                  <a href="#" id="row2Up" class="rowUp">Up</a> | 
                  <a href="#" id="row2Down" class="rowDown">Down</a>
              </td>
          </tr>
          <tr id="row3">
              <td>R3 C1</td>
              <td>R3 C2</td>
              <td>
                  <a href="#" id="row3Link" class="rowLink">Move Me</a> |
                  <a href="#" id="row3Up" class="rowUp">Up</a> | 
                  <a href="#" id="row3Down" class="rowDown">Down</a>
              </td>
          </tr>
      </tbody>
  </table>
  <table id="table2" style="background-color: Yellow; margin-top: 30px;" class="displayTable">
      <caption>Table 2</caption>
      <thead>
          <tr>
              <th>One</th>
              <th>Two</th>
              <th>Three</th>
          </tr>
      </thead>
      <tbody>
      </tbody>
  </table>

Between Tables

One principle is that I don't want to hard-code all of the ID values. But that didn't work out entirely. Write a function and apply it to the click event of all of the elements with class "rowLink". In that function, find the parent row. Then find that row's parent table. Remove the row from the display – but use detach instead of remove so that the HTML still exists. See if that table is table1. There's the hard coding. If so, append the row into table2. Then it seems nice to help the reader notice that the row has moved.

// Setup the "Move Me" links
$(".rowLink").click(function () {
    // get the row containing this link 
    var row = $(this).closest("tr");

    // find out in which table it resides
    var table = $(this).closest("table");

    // move it
    row.detach();

    if (table.is("#table1")) {
        $("#table2").append(row);
    }
    else {
        $("#table1").append(row);
    }

    // draw the user's attention to it
    row.fadeOut();
    row.fadeIn();
});

Up and Down

Now apply a function to the click event of all the elements with class "rowUp." Again get the current row. Then get the previous element. If the previous element is itself a row, then there is room to move up – so detach the row and move it before the previous row. Otherwise do nothing. For moving down, simply switch from prev to next and before to after.

// Setup the "Up" links
$(".rowUp").click(function () {
    var row = $(this).closest("tr");

    // Get the previous element in the DOM
    var previous = row.prev();

    // Check to see if it is a row
    if (previous.is("tr")) {
        // Move row above previous
        row.detach();
        previous.before(row);

        // draw the user's attention to it
        row.fadeOut();
        row.fadeIn();
    }
    // else - already at the top
});
	

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1 Comment

How can you apply this to checkbox..
Say, I have a table with the chekboxes,and want to move checked rows from one table to another? What do I need to change?

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