Angular + ui-sortable lists: CTRL-mousewheel zoom vs normal mousewheel zoom

Question

My understanding is that CTRL-mousewheel zooms are an accessibility feature, built into the browser in question (I am currently testing in Chrome and Opera, both if which use the CTRL- zoom).

This won't ever really be needed for accessibility, however, as the app will not be for the general public. And CTRL-wheel zoom has a nice benefit out-of-box as compared with standard mousewheel zoom over elements: It seems that Angular ui-sortables work perfectly at any zoom/scale.

Unfortunately, from other answers I've found on SO, there is no way, when using CTRL-wheel, to zoom selectively : the browser can only zoom everything. For me, this includes position:fixed overlays scaling at the same time as the main viewport, which is no good.

So I set up some code for scrolling as per whichever element the mouse cursor is over, eg. scale the main viewport using the mousewheel, only if the mouse if over that viewport element.

The problem is that ui-sortable does not behave correctly, when using it for only a single element. I've used scale with transform-origin set at 50% 50% but still, when I drag the ui-sortables at any scale other than 1:1, they appear way off to the left. Any ideas on how to begin to tackle this?

Answer 1

This isn't a problem in Angular's sortable adaptation, rather it's an issue in the underlying jQuery-ui 1.9.2 positioning functions around line 4000 (_generatePosition or maybe one of the others). I believe that as the browser does not modify the actual dimension values during scale or zoom, and the formulae provided in that library do not account for scaling (that I can see), there is no easy fix, since jQuery ui.sortable needs scale-accurate values to calculate correct displacements. (I tried modifying the formula to account for this, but without success.)

The simplest workaround for the present is to manually change the width() / height() of your individual list elements, as seen here. This may require being selective about just what you scale using width() / height(), and what you change using scale (which is generally easier).