I’m asking for insights, suggestions on how to accomplish the following goal …
Lets say I have a row five “boxes” wide. the box could be a text display object.
(maybe a sixth space is needed for a movement area - like those puzzles where you slide tiles to create a picture or put the alphabet in order.
For now, let’s say there are five boxes/objects in the row.
Put one of letters A, B, C, D, E in each of the five boxes. When I click on box D and drag it between B and C, I want C to move over where D was and drop D so it now is A, B, D, C, E.
I know how to click at drag something from here to there, but the simultaneous shifting of the other object to make space is a bit of a puzzle. The shift would sometimes be left, sometimes right. I suppose would happen on a "Mouse Up: rearranging the letters - say they are in an array, then filling the five boxes with their new content (some would be the same as before) and refreshing that area.
A simpler way would be to have a map/button array representing the locations and I’d just click on the desired object, then click on the desired new location on the map/button and the swap/movement would take place with an object/variable refresh.
I mentioned “swap” because I’ve seen mechanism where clicking on two objects swaps them - that’s pretty easy. But it can take a lot of clicks if, for example, the swapped out object is moved to the end of the row and you just wanted it moved over one postion.
So, using the objects and map/buttons representing locations, and clicking to say, Put This, There. with a scheme to move the previous occupant to the left or the right seems the easiest.
I was just wondering if there was a more elegent way to do it?
I can imagine a bit of a neutral zone at the edge of the boxes so, there is no ambiguity or thrashing when, while dragging, the cursor approaches a boundry between the to objects. But again, if nothing happens until the “drop” - like no animation during the drag over - that shouldn’t be a problem.