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[SWIFT] Reorder cells in UICollectionView using drag & drop

by Dejan AtanasovAugust 1st, 2017

Too Long; Didn't Read

In this tutorial, I will cover how to reorder cells in <a href="https://hackernoon.com/tagged/uicollectionview" target="_blank">UICollectionView</a> using drag & drop. I have seen many different approaches on how to do this, some are working decent and some are not. That's why I will show you the approach that is tested and working 100%.

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In this tutorial, I will cover how to reorder cells in UICollectionView using drag & drop. I have seen many different approaches on how to do this, some are working decent and some are not. That's why I will show you the approach that is tested and working 100%.

To make this tutorial shorter, I will only present how to do the reordering and won't show all the required delegate methods. Since you got here, I count that you already know the UICollectionView basics.

UICollectionViewDelegate

We will start by using two delegate methods from the UICollectionViewDelegate protocol.

1 Enable the use of moving items in the UICollectionView by calling canMoveItemAt delegate method. Passing true will enable this feature.

func collectionView(_ collectionView: UICollectionView, canMoveItemAt indexPath: IndexPath) -> Bool {return true}

2 Next, we will implement the moveItemAt delegate method where you will intercept the starting index and the ending index of the both items that are switching places.

func collectionView(_ collectionView: UICollectionView, moveItemAt sourceIndexPath: IndexPath, to destinationIndexPath: IndexPath) {print(“Starting Index: \(sourceIndexPath.item)”)print(“Ending Index: \(destinationIndexPath.item)”)}