Html5 drag and drop on svg element

I know this is an old question, I arrived here from this other question that was marked as a duplicate of this one, and wanted to add a possible solution that doesn’t require jQuery or any libraries, and that works in all major browsers. It is based on this tutorial recommended by @AmirHossein Mehrvarzi.

This small solution doesn’t use the drag events, just the mousedown, mouseup and mousemove. This is how it works:

  • When the mouse is down on the rectangle, it saves the mouse position and the active element.
  • When the mouse moves, the rectangle coordinates are updated with the new mouse position.
  • When the mouse is up, it resets the active element.

From the code in the question above:

var selectedElement = null;
var currentX = 0;
var currentY = 0;

$(document).ready(function() {
    
    function handleDragStart(e) {
        log("handleDragStart");                
        this.style.opacity = '0.4';  // this ==> e.target is the source node.
    };
    
    var registercb = function () {
       
        $("#cvs > rect").mousedown(function (e) {
            // save the original values when the user clicks on the element
            currentX = e.clientX;
            currentY = e.clientY;
            selectedElement = e.target;
        }).mousemove(function (e) {    
            // if there is an active element, move it around by updating its coordinates           
            if (selectedElement) {
                var dx = parseInt(selectedElement.getAttribute("x")) + e.clientX - currentX;
                var dy = parseInt(selectedElement.getAttribute("y")) + e.clientY - currentY;
                currentX = e.clientX;
                currentY = e.clientY;
                selectedElement.setAttribute("x", dx);
                selectedElement.setAttribute("y", dy);
            }
        }).mouseup(function (e) {
            // deactivate element when the mouse is up
            selectedElement = null;  
        });
    };
    
    function log() {
        if (window.console && window.console.log)
            window.console.log('[XXX] ' + Array.prototype.join.call(arguments, ' '));
    };
    
    registercb();
}); 
rect { cursor: move; }
<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.11.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
<h1>SVG/HTML 5 Example</h1>
<svg id="cvs">
    <rect x="0" y="10" width="100" height="80" fill="#69c" />
    <rect x="50" y="50" width="90" height="50" fill="#c66" />        
</svg>

You can also see it on this JSFiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/YNReB/61/

If you want to add drop functionality, you can modify the mouseup function to read the element on the cursor position (with document.elementFromPoint(e.clientX, e.clientY)) and then you can perform actions on the original element and the one where it was dropped.

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