What is going on with jQuery UI Sortable on a touch screen device?

Question

I am using jQuery UI Sortable.

I am developing a mobile only website, so I looked around how to map touch events to mouse events for this to work, and ended up using some code by Oleg Slobodskoi.

This appeared to work nicely. However, on a mobile device (I am using an iPhone to test, but it also happens on the iPhone simulator), when you attempt to shift a second item (i.e. the next item to sort after you have sorted one already), its initial position is offset either side by about the width of the element.

^{When I attempt the second time to drag one of these pink boxes, instead of appearing underneath my finger and shifting with it, it starts about the width of a box away, to the left or right, and then jumps under my finger.}

I've set up an example on jsFiddle. Hit the attach button to add jQuery Sortable to the list items.

I have tried many things, including playing with the change event and attempting to realign it back, but I couldn't get it to reliably work.

How can I stop this problem?

Answer 1

Super simple solution for this one. I wish I could say it was super simple to find, but no... it took a while.

To clarify the symptom, it's that the initially-dragged element is always the one that is dragged on subsequent drags. If you start out dragging b, on subsequent drags b is the one that always moved. Likewise for a and c.

This made me question if perhaps the event was being "recycled." I confirmed that the pageX and pageY values were correct on the touchstart (and touchmove) event, but the values getting to _mouseDown in Sortable were wrong. So, I went to jquery.ui.mouse.js and looked at _mouseDown there. I confirmed that the proper values were coming through, but that the handler was exiting at this line at the top of the method:

// don't let more than one widget handle mouseStart
if( mouseHandled ) { return };

So, I started looking at mouseHandled. There was only one line where this was reset back to false - the following listener at the top:

$( document ).mouseup( function( e ) {
    mouseHandled = false;
});

I realized I must be close. I looked back at the _touchEnd method in the compatibility add-in you're using:

_touchEnd: function(event) {
   this.element.unbind("touchmove." + this.widgetName).unbind("touchend." + this.widgetName);
   this._mouseUp(event);
}, 

Note that _mouseUp is only called on the widget itself -- not the document! Thus, clearly mouseHandled was never being reset. So, I added a document dispatch line to _touchEnd:

_touchEnd: function(event) {
   this.element.unbind("touchmove." + this.widgetName).unbind("touchend." + this.widgetName);
   this._mouseUp(event);
   $(document).trigger('mouseup', event);
}, 

And presto, everything worked correctly.

So, in summary, this one line is the magic one:

$(document).trigger('mouseup', event);

Working forked fiddle here [direct link for iOS viewing].

---

Note: I also changed this line:

/ iPad | iPhone /.test(navigator.userAgent) && (function($) {

To:

/iPad|iPhone|iPod/.test(navigator.userAgent) && (function($) {

Because it didn't work properly with spaces, and you should include support for the iPod touch.