Html5 drag and drop unicode chessboard - html

I am trying to do html5 dragndrop on my html5/css chessboard using unicode pieces but have a problem at the moment with it.
On dragging & dropping the whole 'li' element seems to move & on drop this disrupts the board.
This can be seen on the chess WordPress site at:
http://www.buryknightschess.org.uk/play-chess/
(As can be seen I asked for help with this on SitePoint Forums but haven't had a reply to help yet from there).
Possibly I somehow need just to make the unicode chess pieces draggable & not the whole chess square (<li></li>).
I shall keep trying to fix this but meanwhile I would greatly appreciate any advice to help with this html5 dragndrop issue. I look forward to helpful replies, many thanks

The reason the <li/> is being moved (thus rearranging the chess board) is because in your drop function is calling appendChild:
function drop(event) {
var element = event.dataTransfer.getData("Text");
// This changes the DOM
event.target.appendChild(document.getElementById(element));
event.stopPropagation();
return false;
}
Instead of moving that actual DOM node, the drop function should copy the innerHTML of the node that's being dragged. Here's how the new drop would look function:
function drop(event) {
var coordinate = event.dataTransfer.getData("Text");
var element = document.getElementById(coordinate);
event.target.innerHTML = element.innerHTML; // Moving piece to new cell
element.innerHTML = ""; // Clearing old cell
event.stopPropagation(); // Consider using `event.preventDefault` instead
return false;
}
Also, I'd consider using event.preventDfault instead of event.stopPropagation. This makes it possible to add new drop listeners to the board or one of its parents. For example you may want to add a drop listener to the document body to handle the case where a user tries to drag a piece off the board.
As general remark, have you considering using jQueryUI draggable and droppable libraries? You'd be able to support much richer drag/drop interactions such as snap-to-grid movement and delayed starts. Also, HTML5 drag-and-drop is typically used to allow users to drag files from their OS desktop onto the a web page. The way your using it is totally fine, it's just a little strange.

Related

Unable to display anything through Canvas

I am trying to build a highlighting library with JavaScript and jQuery. I am just diving into Canvasing techniques this week and did not find them to be all that difficult. However, while working today my code has simply stopped working. I know I am probably just missing something obvious but I have been stuck like this for almost 2 hours now and I need to get this project moving forward again. any help would be greatly appreciated.
$(function() {
$('area').click(function(event) {
event.preventDefault();
document.getElementById("ctx").getContext("2d").fillStyle = "#FF0000";
document.getElementById("ctx").getContext("2d").fillRect(0, 0, 200, 200);
} );
} );
I have included my Javascript only since that is the only thing I have been changing recently.
Your code works for me, assuming:
The page has a clickable area.
The page has a canvas with an #id of ctx.
Make sure those 2 things are true about your setup...
Does your canvas element have an #id of ctx? That's not fatal, but the canvas element contains a context so it's a bit misleading.
If you have a canvas element like this:
<canvas id=canvas></canvas>
Then you can get a reusable reference to the canvas's context like this:
// no need to constantly get a context reference ...
// just do it once at the start of your app
var canvas=document.getElementById('canvas');
var context=canvas.getContext('2d');
And you can reuse that context reference to do all your drawing calls:
context.fillStyle='red';
context.fillRect(0,0,200,200);

Play one of a set of audio clips randomly?

So I'm trying to setup a web-page where when you open it, it will play a random piece of music, and when that one finishes, it will play another directly after so you get a constant stream of music, but not in the same order every time. If this goes outside the bounds of HTML and I'm looking at for instance JavaScipt than that's fine.
I know this is probably a rather easy solution, but I'm new to HTML and trying to understand it better.
Thanks in advance if I don't get back to you soon!
This is best solved using JavaScript, which is used to add behavior to a website. HTML is primarily used to structure your site.
We can get a collection of all audio elements with the querySelectorAll function. Then we find a random element with the next line and call the play method.
var audio = document.querySelectorAll("audio");
function playRandom() {
audio[Math.floor(Math.random() * audio.length)].play()
}();
For the second part of your question, you would want to listen for the ended event. Inside the event listener function, you would then call the playRandom() function.
audio.addEventListener("ended", function() {
playRandom();
});

How to add RichEditableText of TextArea using only ActionScript

My head is spinning from two days of trying to find an answer to this seemingly simple question.
I'm developing a Flex/AIR application built entirely in ActionScript -- there's no MXML beyond what was originally auto-created.
I need to dynamically generate some kind of editable text-field with high control over formatting. The TLF text fields all seem great, except that I can't get any of them to render on the screen. Due to the nature of the application, they have to be inside a MovieClip, but since I've read that everything must be a descendant of UIComponent, I use UIMovieClip, which is AddChild'ed to the stage.
I'm about to go crazy here, the whole application is in jeopardy over this. I CAN NOT use MXML, and all the 10,000 examples on the internet are MXML. I need to generate these dynamically. I need to generate upwards of 50 fields under one movieclip based on database data. There's no way to hardcode that with MXML. Please don't suggest to change this. The GUI is very specific about this, and it's the right GUI.
In two days of searching, I can't find a single example in ActionScript, only MXML. I've tried everything that smelled like an example.
Is there some obvious general pointer I'm missing? I'll be happy to post code, but it doesn't make sense because I've been through so many examples.
Does anyone have the simplest possible code for creating any kind of TLF text editing field in ActionScript only (zero MXML), which is then added to a MovieClip or UIMovieClip, which is added to the stage of a desktop AIR application?
I will greatly cherish any help here.
Best,
Per
This should get you started:
//create your TextFlow component
var textFlow:TextFlow = new TextFlow();
var p:ParagraphElement = new ParagraphElement();
var span:SpanElement = new SpanElement();
span.text = "hello world";
p.addChild(span);
textFlow.addChild(p);
//create a Sprite that will contain the text
var textBlock:Sprite = new Sprite();
//create a controller for compositing
var controller:ContainerController = new ContainerController(textBlock);
//set the size of the composition
controller.setCompositionSize(100, 200);
//make the controller control the TextFlow object
textFlow.flowComposer.addController(controller);
//update the composition
textFlow.flowComposer.updateAllControllers();
//add to the stage
addChild(textBlock);
About the size: it is important you use setCompositionSize() instead of the Sprite's width and height properties.
Using addController() you could spread the text over several Sprites. Each Sprite would have its own ContainerController, but all would share the same FlowComposer which would calculate the composition.
warning : using TLF like this can be pretty complicated. Above code is the bare minimum to get things running. I do not know your requirements, but you'll probably hit a few other roadblocks along the way. You have to ask yourself this question: are you really willing to drop all the built-in features of TextArea? It might cost you months of development to get things right, depending on the requirements. You still may want to reconsider your architecture...

Drag objects in canvas

Im looking for an easy to use method of assigning drag behavior to multiple objects (images, shapes etc) in canvas. Does anyone have a good way or know of any libraries for dragging objects around? Thanks
Creating your own mouse events takes a little work - ideally you should either create or use some kind of mini-library. I'm thinking of creating something like this in the near future. Anyway, I created a drag and drop demo on jsFiddle showing how to drag images - you can view it here.
You can create draggable images like this:
var myImage = new DragImage(sourcePath, x, y);
Let me know if you have any questions about this. Hope it helps.
EDIT
There was a bug when dragging multiple images. Here is a new version.
Another thing you might want to check out is easeljs it sort of in the style of AS3... mouseEvents dragging etc...
The HTML Canvas—unlike SVG or HTML—uses a non-retained (or immediate) graphics API. This means that when you draw something (like an image) to the canvas no knowledge of that thing remains. The only thing left is pixels on the canvas, blended with all the previous pixels. You can't really drag a subset of pixels; for one thing, the pixels that were 'under' them are gone. What you would have to do is:
Track the mousedown event and see if it's in the 'right' location for dragging. (You'll have to keep track of what images/objects are where and perform mouse hit detection.)
As the user drags the mouse, redraw the entire canvas from scratch, drawing the image in a new location each time based on the offset between the current mouse location and the initial mousedown location.
Some alternatives that I might suggest:
SVG
Pure HTML
Multiple layered canvases, and drag one transparent canvas over another.
The HTML Canvas is good for a lot of things. User interaction with "elements" that appear to be distinct (but are not) is not one of those things.
Update: Here are some examples showing dragging on the canvas:
http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/examples/dragdrop/dd-region.html
http://www.redsquirrel.com/dave/work/interactivecanvas/
http://langexplr.blogspot.com/2008/11/using-canvas-html-element.html
None of these have created a separate library for tracking your shapes for you, however.
KineticJS is one such Javascript Library that u can use exclusively for animations
Heres the Link html5canvastutorials
Canvas and jCanvas
You're definitely gonna want to check out jCanvas. It's a super clean wrapper for Canvas, which kicks open a lot of doors without adding code complexity. It makes things like this a breeze.
For example, here's a little sandbox of something close to what you're after, with dragging and redrawing built right in:
Drawing an Arrow Between Two Elements.
I ventured down the road of doing everything with DIVs and jQuery but it always fell short on interactivity and quality.
Hope that helps others, like me.
JP
As you create new objects whether they are windows, cards, shapes or images to be draggable, you can store them in an array of "objects currently not selected". When you click on them or select them or start dragging them you can remove them from the array of "objects not selected". This way you can control what can move in the event of a particular mousedown event or mousemove event by checking if it isn't selected. If it is selected it will not be in the "not selected" array and you can move the mouse pointer over other shapes while dragging shapes without them becoming dragged.
Creating arrays of objects you would like to drag also helps with hierarchy. Canvas draws the pixels belonging to the foremost object last. So if the objects are in an array you simply switch their instance as in element in the array say from objectArray[20] to objectArray[4] as you iterate through the array and draw the objects stored in the array elements you can change whether other objects are seen on top or behind other objects.

Approaches to replace cursor in pure AS3 / Flare project?

I've got a pure AS3 (no Flex) project that uses Flare to display and interact with a data visualization. I just implemented some panning behavior, so you can click and drag the visualization around, and now I'd like to give the user a visual indicator that this is possible, by switching the arrow cursor with a nice grabby-looking hand icon.
The user can click and drag at any time except when the mouse is over a clickable node (at which time the cursor swaps to a pointer - this behavior is already in place).
So...
1) Do I need to create my own custom bitmap/sprite or is there a palette of built-in cursors I can use? (I'm not using Flex.)
2) Is there a way to simply replace the default arrow with the pan cursor project-wide, or do I need to attach the swapping to mouse events on display objects? Can I use the stage object to make this behavior apply everywhere?
3) How do I perform the swap? Do I use the Cursor object directly or do I need to get involved with the CursorManager?
Any guidance, pseudo-code, or words of wisdom is greatly appreciated!
I don't think there's a CursorManger in flash, only flex. The way i'm doing is with a custom class which hides the cursor and drags the customized cursor at mouse_move. You have to set it to mouseChildren=false, otherwise will flickr or the buttons will not be clickable. One problem i found is with custom contextual menus. Try this link http://abrahamyan.com/2009/03/23/as3-cursormanager/
A few things I learned (all pretty newby, really). Firstly, there are some built-in cursor options you can set by setting Mouse.cursor to any of the options of MouseCursor.TYPE. The Mouse object is a singleton available app-wide, so anywhere you change it in your code, the change persists until another change is triggered.
For my simple case, I did this:
//on init, start with the "hand"
Mouse.cursor = MouseCursor.HAND;
//on clickable items, change to "pointer", then back to "hand"
myClickableNode.addEventListener(MouseEvent.ROLL_OVER, function(evt:Event):void {
Mouse.cursor = MouseCursor.BUTTON;
});
myClickableNode.addEventListener(MouseEvent.ROLL_OUT, function(evt:Event):void {
Mouse.cursor = MouseCursor.HAND;
});
The result is you always have the "hand" until you rollover something clickable, then you get the "pointer".