Moving svg nodes

Moving svg nodes

I currently create a grid of svg circles made up of rows. I can animate a circle from one row moving into another row, sorted by some attribute value. But when I use a selector to fetch all circles within a row I get them ordered by when they were added to the underlying DOM.

Is there a way, if I created a group for each row, that when I move a circle from one row and insert it into another I actually remove the svg object from one group and insert in into the other so that it's correctly positioned in the underlying DOM?

Hope my question makes sense.