JQuery - animate moving DOM element to new parent?

This is actually quite difficult because you have to remove and add it to the DOM but keep its position. I think you're looking for something like this. Basically we don't animate either the arrow in #cell1 or #cell2. We just create a new one in the body-tag and animate that. That way we don't have to worry about the table cell positions because we can position relative to the document.

var $old = $('#cell1 img');//First we copy the arrow to the new table cell and get the offset to the documentvar $new = $old.clone().appendTo('#cell2');var newOffset = $new.offset();//Get the old position relative to documentvar oldOffset = $old.offset();//we also clone old to the document for the animationvar $temp = $old.clone().appendTo('body');//hide new and old and move $temp to position//also big z-index, make sure to edit this to something that works with the page$temp  .css('position', 'absolute')  .css('left', oldOffset.left)  .css('top', oldOffset.top)  .css('zIndex', 1000);$new.hide();$old.hide();//animate the $temp to the position of the new img$temp.animate( {'top': newOffset.top, 'left':newOffset.left}, 'slow', function(){   //callback function, we remove $old and $temp and show $new   $new.show();   $old.remove();   $temp.remove();});

I think this should point you in the right direction.

@Pim Jager's answer is pretty good, however if you have object references to the original element they would break since the the original element was replaced with a clone

I came up with what I think is a slightly cleaner solution in that it only has a single clone that show up for animation then goes away, leaving the original in the new location.

function moveAnimate(element, newParent){    //Allow passing in either a jQuery object or selector    element = $(element);    newParent= $(newParent);    var oldOffset = element.offset();    element.appendTo(newParent);    var newOffset = element.offset();    var temp = element.clone().appendTo('body');    temp.css({        'position': 'absolute',        'left': oldOffset.left,        'top': oldOffset.top,        'z-index': 1000    });    element.hide();    temp.animate({'top': newOffset.top, 'left': newOffset.left}, 'slow', function(){       element.show();       temp.remove();    });}

To use: moveAnimate('#ElementToMove', '#newContainer')

You'll need to do this in two steps: (1) animation (2) rehoming.

The animation you can take care of with .animate(), as @Ballsacian points out. The rehoming can be accomplished with .html() - for the example above,

var arrowMarkup = $('#cell1').html(); //grab the arrow$('#cell1').html(""); //delete it from the first cell$('#cell2').html(arrowMarkup); //add it to the second cell

Of course, you'll have to complicate that code to integrate the animation. And this way of doing it won't cause the selection (I'm assuming you're selecting a table row?) to activate rows between the old selection and the new one, as the arrow passes by them. That'd be even more complex to achieve.