SVG draggable using JQuery and Jquery-svg

The solution I'm tinkering with involves (to tie it to your case) creating a new div and svg, positioned over the original shape, to act as the handle for the targeted svg object. Make the handle div draggable and store the starting top/left offset externally (think hidden div). Once the "stop" event for the draggable div is fired, figure out the degree of change for the top and left (stopX-startX=changeX) and apply that to the original shapes coordinates. Then .remove() your temporary shape.

jQuery UI draggable behavior does work, but you need to update the position manually in the drag handler, as relative CSS positioning doesn't work inside SVG.

svg.rect(20,10,100,50, 10, 10, {fill:'#666'});
svg.rect(40,20,100,50, 10, 10, {fill:'#999'});
svg.rect(60,30,100,50, 10, 10, {fill:'#ccc'});

$('rect')
  .draggable()
  .bind('mousedown', function(event, ui){
    // bring target to front
    $(event.target.parentElement).append( event.target );
  })
  .bind('drag', function(event, ui){
    // update coordinates manually, since top/left style props don't work on SVG
    event.target.setAttribute('x', ui.position.left);
    event.target.setAttribute('y', ui.position.top);
  });

This link has an excellent description of how to solve the problem in general (i.e., without requiring JQuery), and that is definitely the best solution I've seen. However, I wanted to keep using JQuery's excellent Draggable API.

I recently spent a couple days hammering at this problem. The accepted answer above is what I tried first, but I couldn't get it to work right in Firefox. There's something about how browsers handle SVG coordinates differently.

I came up with a solution that worked fairly well for me, in both Chrome and Firefox, and lets me keep using JQuery UI. I haven't tested it everywhere. It's definitely a hack.

You can see a quick mock-up of what I did in a fiddle here. The key idea is to use a proxy div which you keep hovering exactly over the svg element you want to drag. Then you change the svg element's x and y coordinates as you drag the proxy div. Something like this:

$('#proxy').on('drag', function(e)
    {
        t = $('#background');
        prox = $('#proxy');
        t.attr('x', t.attr('x')*1
                   + prox.css('left').slice(0,-2)*1
                   - prox.data('position').left)
            .attr('y', t.attr('y')*1
                      + prox.css('top').slice(0,-2)*1
                      - prox.data('position').top);
        prox.data('position',{top : prox.css('top').slice(0,-2)*1,
                              left: prox.css('left').slice(0,-2)*1}
                  );
    });

In my case the SVG element I wanted to drag would always fill a certain square on the screen, so it was very easy to position the proxy div over the target. In other situations it could be much more difficult. It's also not too hard to use the 'containment' option to make sure you don't drag the background outside the frame...it just takes some careful math and you have to reset the containment in between each drag.

To make this applicable to more SVG elements, you could use transforms rather than x and y coordinates.