Column moving

Table of contents

• Overview
• Enabling plugin
• Drag and move actions of manualColumnMove plugin

Overview

This page shows you how to move columns in Handsontable.

Enabling plugin

Use the setting manualColumnMove: true to enable this feature.

A draggable move handle appears above the selected column header. You can click and drag it to any location in the grid.

const container = document.querySelector('#example1'); const hot = new Handsontable(container, { data: Handsontable.helper.createSpreadsheetData(200, 20), width: '100%', height: 320, rowHeaders: true, colHeaders: true, colWidths: 100, manualColumnMove: true, licenseKey: 'non-commercial-and-evaluation' }); <script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/handsontable@11.0/dist/handsontable.full.min.js"></script> <link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/handsontable@11.0/dist/handsontable.full.min.css" /> <div id="example1" class="hot "></div>

const container = document.querySelector('#example1');

const hot = new Handsontable(container, {
  data: Handsontable.helper.createSpreadsheetData(200, 20),
  width: '100%',
  height: 320,
  rowHeaders: true,
  colHeaders: true,
  colWidths: 100,
  manualColumnMove: true,
  licenseKey: 'non-commercial-and-evaluation'
});

Drag and move actions of manualColumnMove plugin

There are significant differences between the plugin's dragColumns and moveColumns API functions. Both of them change the order of columns, but they rely on different kinds of indexes. The differences between them are shown in the diagrams below.

TIP

Both of these methods trigger the beforeColumnMove and afterColumnMove hooks, but only dragColumns passes the dropIndex argument to them.

The dragColumns method has a dropIndex parameter, which points to where the elements are being dropped.

The moveColumns method has a finalIndex parameter, which points to where the elements will be placed after the moving action - finalIndex being the index of the first moved element.

The moveColumns function cannot perform some actions, e.g., more than one element can't be moved to the last position. In this scenario, the move will be cancelled. The Plugin's isMovePossible API method and the movePossible parameters beforeColumnMove and afterColumnMove hooks help in determine such situations.