Attach Files to Task with Drag and Drop

One of the best reasons to use a Silverlight control on a SharePoint web page is you get rich features everyone expects. Perhaps the simplest, most intuitive one is dragging and dropping a file. It also happens to be one of the most powerful and we're happy to make it possible in our IntelliGantt Web Part for SharePoint. Now you can drag a file from your computer, drop it onto a SharePoint tasks and have it saved as an attachment.

This is a natural extension of how tasks are performed as often there is some digital output that can be associated with the task. While it was possible to add attachments before, the user experience was clunky and did not leverage the well-ingrained drag and drop metaphor.

Here is our forum page detailing how it works.

And here is what it looks like.




What's more, we also made it interactive. This means we popup supporting information when you mouse over the paperclip image. A popup list box will appear containing the names of each file attached to the task. You can select any name and the attachment will appear in a new browser window for you.

Finally, as easy as we made it to add files, we allow you to remove them individually as well. Simply click on the '-' symbol to the right of the file name to remove that attachment from the task.

And if this is just a bit too much power for you, you can disable this feature so that you can view and select attachments, but not add or remove them.

You can check out this web part today, either as a full-fledged WSP to install, or as a simple, quick desktop client demonstration.