Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Drag and Drop (Honeycomb/ICS)

Drag and drop is already available with Honeycomb and up. In this example, we will see how to implement a simple Drag and Drop Operation.

We have a ListView with some items. The other half of the screen would have a drop area which has a single TextView. We will see, how to drag items from the ListView, drop them into the drop area, which will update the TextView with the list item's title, and also, that particular item would be removed from the ListView.

We will trigger the drag operation, when you long tap on an item in the ListView. After the drag operation is started, you will see a floating view of the selected item, which you can move around the screen. When you approach the drop area, the background of the drop area would change, which means that you can now drop your item. Once you leave the item, the TextView inside the drop area will show the text of the selected item.





This should also work on Ice Cream Sandwich. You can find the whole source code here. The code is quite self-explanatory. But, if you have any queries, let me know through the comment form. There are a few comments in the code to help you.