Select Cells On A Table By Dragging

Here’s a working prototype: http://jsfiddle.net/few5E/ Using jQuery for DOM hooking, but could easily be implemented with another framework.

Update: http://jsfiddle.net/Brv6J/ a slightly different version – the highlighted state will only change when you release and click again.

Update 2: http://jsfiddle.net/Brv6J/3/ – binding onselectstart so that text is not selected in IE.

A few relevant facts:

The mousedown event of the table cells is hooked to track the actual click. This event is stopped, so that text selection is hindered. Also binding ontextselect for the same effect in IE.
The mouseover event will toggle the highlighted class for the cell
The mouseout event is hooked on document. This is to ensure that it always runs. If the mouseup event was hooked on the table cell, it would not trigger if you released the mouse key with the mouse outside of the table. This state is tracked in isMouseDown.

Full source code for reference:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
 "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
  <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/>
  <title></title>
  <style type="text/css" media="screen">
    table td {
      width:100px;
      height:100px;
      text-align:center;
      vertical-align:middle;
      background-color:#ccc;
    }

    table td.highlighted {
      background-color:#999;
    }
  </style>
</head>
<body>
  <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="1" id="our_table">
    <tr>
      <td>a</td>
      <td>b</td>
      <td>c</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>d</td>
      <td>e</td>
      <td>f</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>g</td>
      <td>h</td>
      <td>i</td>
    </tr>
  </table>

  <script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
  <script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8">
    $(function () {
      var isMouseDown = false;
      $("#our_table td")
        .mousedown(function () {
          isMouseDown = true;
          $(this).toggleClass("highlighted");
          return false; // prevent text selection
        })
        .mouseover(function () {
          if (isMouseDown) {
            $(this).toggleClass("highlighted");
          }
        })
        .bind("selectstart", function () {
          return false; // prevent text selection in IE
        });

      $(document)
        .mouseup(function () {
          isMouseDown = false;
        });
    });
  </script>
</body>
</html>

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