Animated AJAX Record Deletion Using Dojo

By  on  

I'm a huge fan of WordPress' method of individual article deletion. You click the delete link, the menu item animates red, and the item disappears. Here's how to achieve that functionality with Dojo JavaScript.

The PHP - Content & Header

The following snippet goes at the top of the page:

if(isset($_GET['delete'])) {
	$query = 'DELETE FROM my_table WHERE item_id = '.(int)$_GET['delete'];
	$result = mysql_query($query,$link);
}

The following is used to display the records:

$query = 'SELECT * FROM my_table ORDER BY title ASC';
$result = mysql_query($query,$link);
while($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)) {
	echo '<div class="record" id="record-',$row['item_id'],'">
				<a href="?delete=',$row['item_id'],'" class="delete">Delete</a>
				<strong>',$row['title'],'</strong>
			</div>';
}

The Dojo Toolkit JavaScript

dojo.addOnLoad(function() {
	dojo.query('a.delete').connect('onclick',function(e) {
		var a = this;
		dojo.anim(a.parentNode,{
			backgroundColor: '#fb6c6c'
		},300);
		dojo.stopEvent(e);
		dojo.xhr('get',{
			content: {
				ajax: 1
			},
			url: dojo.attr(a,'href'),
			load: function() {
				dojo.anim(a.parentNode,{
					opacity: 0
				},300,null,function() {
					dojo.query(a.parentNode).orphan();
				});
			}
		});
	});
});

For every link, we add a click event that triggers the AJAX request. During the request, we transition the containing element to a red background. When the AJAX request returns a "success" response, we slide the element off of the screen.

How would you use this? Share!

Recent Features

  • By
    Welcome to My New Office

    My first professional web development was at a small print shop where I sat in a windowless cubical all day. I suffered that boxed in environment for almost five years before I was able to find a remote job where I worked from home. The first...

  • By
    CSS 3D Folding Animation

    Google Plus provides loads of inspiration for front-end developers, especially when it comes to the CSS and JavaScript wonders they create. Last year I duplicated their incredible PhotoStack effect with both MooTools and pure CSS; this time I'm going to duplicate...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Multiple Backgrounds with CSS

    Anyone that's been in the web development industry for 5+ years knows that there are certain features that we should have had several years ago. One of those features is the HTML5 placeholder; we used JavaScript shims for a decade before placeholder came...

  • By
    Fancy Navigation with MooTools JavaScript

    Navigation menus are traditionally boring, right? Most of the time the navigation menu consists of some imagery with a corresponding mouseover image. Where's the originality? I've created a fancy navigation menu that highlights navigation items and creates a chain effect. The XHTML Just some simple...

Discussion

  1. So, you’re learning Dojo now? I would like to see more! First comment (I think)!

  2. MP

    Hi man, great work as always!

    what does the $link variable does in the two sql-commands? I can’t get this or the Jquery-example too work, but if I remove the $link when I get the data from table I got result.

  3. @MP: The $link variable is the connection returned from the mysql_connect() function within PHP. It’s not a required argument.

  4. Ludovic

    Hi, This works very well, he’s the same script to add a record?

  5. Jason

    Nice. Do you have a jquery demo version?

  6. Jason

    nevermind. I found it.

  7. AnthonK

    But,how about to give an “alert-message” to warn some deleted records? Which part of code i should add? Thanks.

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!