How to implement List in .Net?

jQuery: What is the best way to implement a sortable list with javascript?

• jQuery UI was most obvious to me -- but is there a better, leaner, faster way to implement a sortable list? Can I do it about as easily without having to rely on jQuery UI? If so, how?

• Answer:

  If you're looking for a quick solution, use an existing one and as jQuery is so great, I'd say use a jQuery plugin. You don't need to use a plugin from jQuery UI, in fact the only sorting one I'm aware of that they have is a drag and drop based sorting plugin. If this isn't what you need then there are other sorting plugins that you can use, you will find plenty on Google. If you really don't want to use jQuery for whatever reason then you can base a very simple design off Array.prototype.sort() (see the Mozilla developer Network for more info on this function). This will sort numerically and alphabetically. As to the elements you actually want to sort, use an unordered list (can use others) to display each item. The general principal is to grab some data from each item and store it in an array, then use the native sort function. As a basic example you could do something like this (using jQuery selectors, you can equally use the more verbose plain javascript equivalent): HTML: <ul> <li>Carrot</li> <li>Apple</li> <li>Bannana</li> <li>Lettuce</li> </ul> Javascript: var i, sortArray = new Array(), refObject = new Object(); $("li").each(function(){ sortArray.push( $(this).text() ); refObject[$(this).text()] = $(this).clone(); }).remove(); sortArray.sort(); for(i=0;i<sortArray.length;i++){ refObject[ sortArray.pop() ].appendTo('ul'); } This is quite "hard coded" to the HTML and you could adjust it to make your own simple jQuery plugin for more generic usage. If you want to sort by other things like price etc. you can do that too. Grab the price from the element, strip the '$' character from the price and then use sort(). Numeric sorting requires some extra arguments compared to alphabetical sorting so I suggest you read up on it.