Ever wished you had a form element that emulated one of these?
For one of my clients we've got a need to have users assigned to groups, and we've employed some cool code written by my friend Steven Van Gemert that takes two standard select boxes to accomplish this sort of control.
It works, but we end up with lists that look like this:
Because of the nature of the select element, the width cannot be controlled -- at least in IE6, I'm honestly not sure about FF, IE7, Safari or any other browser.
I've been thinking about this problem for quite some time, and thought that a jQuery plug-in would be a nice way to solve the problem.
I've got some preliminary work done, but it's by no means finished. Look at demo that shows what I've got so far.
While I've not yet coded it, my plan is to automatically add and remove hidden form fields, one for each item. If it's moved over to the right: add a hidden field. If the item is moved over to the left: remove the hidden field corresponding to that item.
I figure, that doing this will allow the developer to simply submit the form as normal and handle the hidden fields as they normally would.
So, that's an idea for a plug-in that's been swimmin' around in my head for quite a while now. I've just been looking for the time to work on it. I've half expected someone to beat me to the punch.
Also, I'm not brilliant when it comes to CSS, so if anyone wanted to help out on that front, I probably wouldn't say no. :o)
