Drag And Drop RecyclerView Items

Before continuing this post, I recommend that you read my previous one on Swipe To Dismiss RecyclerView Items as this will build upon the ItemTouchHelper class discussed there. Once you’ve done that, come back to this short post and learn how to drag and drop RecyclerView items like this:

Swap Adapter Items

Before we can properly use the drag and drop feature, we need to add another method to our Adapter that swaps two items. You can use `Collections.swap() to do this easily on a List object:

	public void swap(int firstPosition, int secondPosition) {
		Collections.swap(movies, firstPosition, secondPosition);
		notifyItemMoved(firstPosition, secondPosition);
	}

Implement onMove

In our previous lesson, you’ll recall we left our implementation of onMove blank. To make us of it, all we have to do is make sure it swaps our Adapter items:

	@Override
	public boolean onMove(RecyclerView recyclerView, RecyclerView.ViewHolder viewHolder, RecyclerView.ViewHolder target) {
	   mMovieAdapter.swap(viewHolder.getAdapterPosition(), target.getAdapterPosition());
	   return true;
	}

Once you’ve done those two things, in addition to all the necessary steps for swipe-to-dismiss, you’re done. If you chose to only use the drag and drop feature, you can delet the remove() function from the adapter and the implementation of onSwap() inside the ItemTouchHelper class.

I hope this simple tutorial helps you advance your RecyclerView skills. I have updated the MovieList project on GitHub to include the code from this example.