How to do a Drag-and-Drop UI dialog?

Report · May 25, 2016

Hi all,

I'm new to InDesign scripting and I'm trying to figure out how I could create a drag and drop UI dialog, something like https://github.com/marceljuenemann/angular-drag-and-drop-lists or https://rubaxa.github.io/Sortable/ . Say I want a list of people you can include as authors, and I want you to be able to drag the ones you want from the left to the right, rearrange them in the preferred order, and hit "ok" and indesign will, say, update all the footers.

I'd use the checkboxes option, except that I need people to be able to rearrange the order. Obviously InDesign can do something like this because the content collector is a drag-and-drop UI and you can rearrange the order of things in it, I just haven't been able to find any info on creating UI like this!

I'm very confused by the fact there's a dialog object, but also Script UI, but also I can apparently create UI with flex (but maybe that's old fashioned?), but also there are other ways too?

Any pointers or leads would be appreciated. Thanks!

Report · May 25, 2016

Please note the following:

-> Flex support is almost gone. If you have CC version in mind, just can forget about it.

-> Try creating an Extension in HTML5 where you do all you want.

You can drag-drop from the panel to layout (e.g., from <div> or <tr> item to layout).

-> Yet to see if javascript UI provides drag-drop support

-> Native plugin option. You can drag-drop however you want but it has complexity in implementation.

Report · May 25, 2016

Hi, thanks, this is very helpful!

That's good to know about flex. Can you point me anywhere to learn about creating extensions in HTML5? So far I've just been scripting in jsx. I don't need to drag drop from UI to layout, I just want to be able to drag drop between two parts of the dialog -- one, a list of options, and two, where the user puts their preferred options in their preferred order, if that makes sense.

Thanks again!