How to Persist Changes Made with jQuery UI Sortable to a Database?

jQuery UI Sortable: Persist Order Changes to a Database

When using the jQuery UI sortable function to allow users to rearrange elements, it's often desirable to save the new order to a database. Here's how to achieve this:

The jQuery UI sortable feature provides a serialize method for this purpose. It creates an array of elements using their IDs. For instance, a list like this:

<code class="html"><ul id="sortable">
  <li id="item-1">
  <li id="item-2">
  ...
</ul></code>

When the serialize method is triggered, it produces a POST query string like this:

item[]=1&item[]=2

Assuming each element's ID corresponds to the database ID, you can iterate through the POSTed array and update the elements' positions in the database.

Here's an example in PHP:

<code class="php">$i = 0;

foreach ($_POST['item'] as $value) {
  // Execute statement:
  // UPDATE [Table] SET [Position] = $i WHERE [EntityId] = $value
  $i++;
}</code>

To initiate the serialization and order update upon change, use this jQuery code:

<code class="javascript">$('#element').sortable({
  axis: 'y',
  update: function (event, ui) {
    var data = $(this).sortable('serialize');

    // POST to server using $.post or $.ajax
    $.ajax({
      data: data,
      type: 'POST',
      url: '/your/url/here'
    });
  }
});</code>

This code creates a POST request with the updated order and sends it to the specified URL.

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