jQuery Forum

Hi gruppe,
I hope you'll indulge this "which way should I go?" request. I've
spent the last two days prototyping an interface that is a form
builder for an event registration service. An organizer can sell
things, ask questions to collect data, etc. We want to have a list
of these "controls" and let them be placed anywhere in the form to
support top-to-bottom ordering (sortable), mutually-exclusive grouping
(drag/drop into a group), parent/children relationships (nesting) and
so forth.
I've toyed around with nested sortables using connectWith which is
close although it doesn't seem feasible to increase the nesting depth
unless a node already exists and it requires quite a bit of precision
with the mouse (this could be my CSS howeer). I've tried using drag/
drop and catching the drop to clone nodes but that doesn't seem to
allow the cloned object to be marked droppable (even after messing
with z-index). At a bit of a loss to move forward, I was hoping the
list could share two things:
1. Given where jQuery UI is today and how far out a full 1.5 release
is, should I try to hack it out with the current widgets, try to wait
for the full 1.5 or go backwards for now and use the Interface
plugins? I tried the SVN BER but some seemingly relevant features
like greedy:true in droppable are still not checked in.
2. With the form builder approach described, is this sortable/
draggable/droppable (and even resizable!) approach reasonable? Or
should I bite off less at once? It sounds like various people here
are working on similar ideas... I'd love to see demos or code snippets
if anyone is open to sharing.
Thanks,
Brian