HTMLElement: drop event

Baseline Widely available

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since July 2015.

The drop event is fired when an element or text selection is dropped on a valid drop target. To ensure that the drop event always fires as expected, you should always include a preventDefault() call in the part of your code which handles the dragover event.

This event is cancelable and may bubble up to the Document and Window objects.

Syntax

Use the event name in methods like addEventListener(), or set an event handler property.

js
addEventListener("drop", (event) => {});

ondrop = (event) => {};

Event type

A DragEvent. Inherits from Event.

Event UIEvent MouseEvent DragEvent

Event properties

In addition to the properties listed below, properties from the parent interface, Event, are available.

DragEvent.dataTransfer Read only

The data that is transferred during a drag-and-drop interaction.

Examples

A minimal drag-and-drop example

In this example, we have a draggable element inside a container. Try grabbing the element, dragging it over the other container, and releasing it.

We use three event handlers here:

  • in the dragstart event handler, we get a reference to the element that the user dragged
  • in the dragover event handler for the target container, we call event.preventDefault(), which enables it to receive drop events.
  • in the drop event handler for the drop zone, we handle moving the draggable element from the original container to the drop zone.

For a more complete example of drag and drop, see the page for the drag event.

HTML

html
<div class="dropzone">
  <div id="draggable" draggable="true">This div is draggable</div>
</div>
<div class="dropzone" id="drop-target"></div>

CSS

css
body {
  /* Prevent the user from selecting text in the example */
  user-select: none;
}

#draggable {
  text-align: center;
  background: white;
}

.dropzone {
  width: 200px;
  height: 20px;
  background: blueviolet;
  margin: 10px;
  padding: 10px;
}

JavaScript

js
let dragged = null;

const source = document.getElementById("draggable");
source.addEventListener("dragstart", (event) => {
  // store a ref. on the dragged elem
  dragged = event.target;
});

const target = document.getElementById("drop-target");
target.addEventListener("dragover", (event) => {
  // prevent default to allow drop
  event.preventDefault();
});

target.addEventListener("drop", (event) => {
  // prevent default action (open as a link for some elements)
  event.preventDefault();
  // move dragged element to the selected drop target
  if (event.target.className === "dropzone") {
    dragged.parentNode.removeChild(dragged);
    event.target.appendChild(dragged);
  }
});

Result

Specifications

Specification
HTML Standard
# ix-handler-ondrop
HTML Standard
# event-dnd-drop

Browser compatibility

BCD tables only load in the browser

See also