jquery-logo - appendToThe jQuery.appendTo method makes it easy to move a DOM element. You won’t need to be concerned with creating or destroying elements and event handlers are preserved.

Moving DOM elements using vanilla JavaScript can be a bit tedious. It’s certainly possible, and it is a good idea to understand the steps, but it does require more code. jQuery provides powerful abstraction for this task, however, and the amount of code needed is minimal.

Whenever possible, I favor using vanilla JavaScript to solve a problem, because leaning on jQuery too much can weaken your overall JavaScript skills. In this case, however, I recommend letting jQuery do all of the work for you. The main issue with vanilla JavaScript when it comes to moving DOM elements is the need to understand the intricacies of the low-level hierarchical DOM API. For example, you’ll need to get ahold of the parent element of the DOM node, after which you’ll want to move your target element. Frankly, I commend anyone who wants to take on this challenge, but in many cases, it just makes sense to leverage jQuery.

Try it yourself !

See the Pen Moving DOM elements with jQuery by Front End Video (@frontendvideo) on CodePen.

In the above example, click the “HTML” tab. There are two DIVs with the IDs: “left-list” and “right-list“. DIV#left-list has an unordered list with the days of the week, and DIV#right-list is empty. Now click the “JS” tab. You’ll see that there is a click-event handler for $('#left-list li'). This means that when any of the list items are clicked, the anonymous function you see will be executed.

Go ahead and click each of the days of the week and you’ll see that it is moved to the DIV#right-list element. After each element is moved, if you click it, nothing happens.

In the anonymous function, we use the JavaScript this keyword to reference the element that was clicked. Actually, we wrap the JavaScript this keyword with jQuery: $(this). We then chain the .appendTo method, and pass it a target element: .appendTo( $('#right-list') ). Here we are telling jQuery: “Move this element to the #right-list element, and make it the last child“. So, we are appending it to DIV#right-list. We then chain this: .unbind('click');. The reason we do that is: the jQuery appendTo method retains any event bindings for elements that are moved. Most of the time, this is probably what you want. But in this case, we do not want the event bindings to travel with the element because once a list item is moved inside of the #right-list element, we no longer want it to have a click-event handler. But that is simply for this example.

Summary

Simply put, moving DOM elements with vanilla JavaScript can be messy business, but the jQuery.appendTo method provides abstraction that simplifies this process. Instead of having to dig into the low-level DOM API, you can simply specify the source and target HTML elements. In other words, you let jQuery know which element you want to move, and which element you want to append it to. In cases such as these, it’s often best to let jQuery do all of the work for you. It will certainly minimize the amount of boilerplate coding you’ll have to do, and will help to keep your JavaScript easier to manage.