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
    5 Awesome New Mozilla Technologies You&#8217;ve Never Heard Of

    My trip to Mozilla Summit 2013 was incredible.  I've spent so much time focusing on my project that I had lost sight of all of the great work Mozillians were putting out.  MozSummit provided the perfect reminder of how brilliant my colleagues are and how much...

  • By
    Introducing MooTools Templated

    One major problem with creating UI components with the MooTools JavaScript framework is that there isn't a great way of allowing customization of template and ease of node creation. As of today, there are two ways of creating: new Element Madness The first way to create UI-driven...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Truly Responsive Images with responsive-images.js

    Responsive web design is something you hear a lot about these days. The moment I really started to get into responsive design was a few months ago when I started to realise that 'responsive' is not just about scaling your websites to the size of your...

  • By
    Create Custom Events in MooTools 1.2

    Javascript has a number of native events like "mouseover," "mouseout", "click", and so on. What if you want to create your own events though? Creating events using MooTools is as easy as it gets. The MooTools JavaScript What's great about creating custom events in MooTools is...

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!