What's up with drag and drop?

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G

Guest

Files do not stay in the order they are displayed when dragged and dropped.
To repro:
Get twenty files, named 1.mp3 to 20.mp3
Set explorer to sort them by name
Select them and drag them to WMP 10 or 11

Notice that the first ~20% of the files that should be listed at the
beginning are listed at the end instead. This is the same result you'll get
if you drag and drop to any program that doesn't re-order files as they are
dropped.

What should happen:
Files are dragged in the order that they are displayed. Period.

Anybody know what's up with this? This situation has been around since 95.
Am I crazy? Will it be fixed in Vista???
 
The order the names are presented have no bearing on the physical order
of the files. Solely a user interface convenience. This is been around
since at least MS-DOS 3.0 (I never played with 2 or 1 )
 
I am not sure if this has any bearing, but you say these items are named 1, 2
etc to 20. Suppose you rename them 01, 02 etc to 20. Would this make any
difference? It does for me when I list items for transfer.
 
That may be true, however, physical location on the drive should have
absolutely no bearing on drag and drop. The drag and drop operation doesn't
involve the actual files, their location in the NTFS file system, or even the
location on disk of the individual bits that consitute the file. The only
thing involved is a pointer to the file (c:\foo.bar). When multiple files
are selected, explorer should be listing those files in the order that the
user sees them. That means in alphabetical order, creation or modification
date, etc. There is absolutely NO reason why this cannot be done, and NO
reason why it should not have been done.
In addition, your explanation is completely wrong in this case. The order
isn't by how they are arranged on disk. It is always in order, but the order
is shifted. Files a through z are dropped in order g-z,a-f. It doesn't
matter what order they are on the disk. Quite frankly, the whole thing is BS
and the more I think about this bug the more annoyed I get.
 
That sounds like something else is going on. Think for a second about
"how explorer displays", and the options for "sorting the view". So in
this case is it how they get arranged in the WMP "listing"?
 
Sorry, you are right. My example was wrong. The problem persists, however.

I have now realized that the files are in order, but they start on the file
you click on when initiating the drag and drop. To fix the problem, I have
to click on the first file when dragging. How stupid.
 
William said:
Files do not stay in the order they are displayed when dragged and dropped.
To repro:
Get twenty files, named 1.mp3 to 20.mp3
Set explorer to sort them by name
Select them and drag them to WMP 10 or 11

Notice that the first ~20% of the files that should be listed at the
beginning are listed at the end instead. This is the same result you'll get
if you drag and drop to any program that doesn't re-order files as they are
dropped.

What should happen:
Files are dragged in the order that they are displayed. Period.

Anybody know what's up with this? This situation has been around since 95.
Am I crazy? Will it be fixed in Vista???
Click to expand...


I run into this at work all the time. If I re-save an edited file and
peek into an open Explorer Window it disappears to the end of the list
when I have 'Date Modified' selected as newest at the top. The solution
in my case of course is to have 'newest at the bottom' of the listing
and it will pop right in there as you watch. Its just the way Windows
Explorer works, live with it or get something else.

John
 
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