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
    An Interview with Eric Meyer

    Your early CSS books were instrumental in pushing my love for front end technologies. What was it about CSS that you fell in love with and drove you to write about it? At first blush, it was the simplicity of it as compared to the table-and-spacer...

  • By
    39 Shirts &#8211; Leaving Mozilla

    In 2001 I had just graduated from a small town high school and headed off to a small town college. I found myself in the quaint computer lab where the substandard computers featured two browsers: Internet Explorer and Mozilla. It was this lab where I fell...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Sexy Album Art with MooTools or jQuery

    The way that album information displays is usually insanely boring. Music is supposed to be fun and moving, right? Luckily MooTools and jQuery allow us to communicate that creativity on the web. The XHTML A few structure DIVs and the album information. The CSS The CSS...

  • By
    Introducing MooTools HeatMap

    It's often interesting to think about where on a given element, whether it be the page, an image, or a static DIV, your users are clicking.  With that curiosity in mind, I've created HeatMap: a MooTools class that allows you to detect, load, save, and...

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!