DataTransfer: items property

Baseline Widely available

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since July 2015.

The read-only items property of the DataTransfer interface is a list of the data transfer items in a drag operation. The list includes one item for each item in the operation and if the operation had no items, the list is empty.

Value

A DataTransferItemList object containing DataTransferItem objects representing the items being dragged in a drag operation, one list item for each object being dragged. If the drag operation had no data, the list is empty.

Examples

Logging dragged items

This example uses items to log information about dragged items.

HTML

html
<ul>
  <li id="source1" draggable="true">Drag Item 1 to the Drop Zone</li>
  <li id="source2" draggable="true">Drag Item 2 to the Drop Zone</li>
</ul>
<div id="target">Drop Zone</div>

<button id="reset">Reset</button>

CSS

css
div {
  margin: 0em;
  padding: 2em;
}

#target {
  border: 1px solid black;
}

JavaScript

js
function dragstartHandler(ev) {
  console.log(`dragstart: target.id = ${ev.target.id}`);
  // Add this element's id to the drag payload so the drop handler will
  // know which element to add to its tree
  ev.dataTransfer.setData("text/plain", ev.target.id);
  ev.dataTransfer.effectAllowed = "move";
}

function dropHandler(ev) {
  ev.preventDefault();
  // Get the id of the target and add the moved element to the target's DOM
  const data = ev.dataTransfer.getData("text");
  ev.target.appendChild(document.getElementById(data));
  // Print each item's "kind" and "type"
  if (ev.dataTransfer.items) {
    for (const item of ev.dataTransfer.items) {
      console.log(`kind = ${item.kind}, type = ${item.type}`);
    }
  }
}

function dragoverHandler(ev) {
  ev.preventDefault();
  // Set the dropEffect to move
  ev.dataTransfer.dropEffect = "move";
}

const source1 = document.querySelector("#source1");
const source2 = document.querySelector("#source2");
const target = document.querySelector("#target");

source1.addEventListener("dragstart", dragstartHandler);
source2.addEventListener("dragstart", dragstartHandler);
target.addEventListener("dragover", dragoverHandler);
target.addEventListener("drop", dropHandler);

const reset = document.querySelector("#reset");
reset.addEventListener("click", () => document.location.reload());

Result

Specifications

Specification
HTML Standard
# dom-datatransfer-items-dev

Browser compatibility

BCD tables only load in the browser

See also