jQuery UI sortable doesn't sort when it's handle is outside the container element

Is there something wrong with my bug submission? I saw that the developers has fixed some newer bugs in the recent "Recent Changes", so I thought there might be a problem with mine.

Well, in general 2 days is an extremely fast turn-around time on a bug. However, there is something specific about this bug that will cause it to not get any attention: the fact that it's a bug for sortable. Sortable, along with all of the other interaction plugins, is going to be rewritten from scratch for the 2.0 release, so we are not actively fixing bugs (any newly reported bug is almost guaranteed to be a long standing issue as these plugins are almost never touched). We're not happy about this situation, and we're very committed to rectifying this problem with the 2.0 release. However, if someone provides a reasonable patch, we will review it and land it if it works.

Thank you scott for your respond. After I knew that it might take a while for you guys to fix this, and scince I really need this to be fixed, I decided to dig deep into the source of sortable().

I found out that there is a problem calculating the 'this.offset.click.left' inside ' _intersectsWithPointer()'.

I didn't have enough time to find out why it being mis-calculated, so I just used a static fix for my website. Here it is:

// jQuery UI sortable fixer - dirty and static fix for now
$.extend($['ui']['sortable'].prototype, {
	_intersectsWithPointer: function(item) {

		var isOverElementHeight = $.ui.isOverAxis(this.positionAbs.top + this.offset.click.top, item.top, item.height),
				isOverElementWidth = $.ui.isOverAxis(this.positionAbs.left + this.offset.click.left /* THIS IS THE FIX */ + 50 /* END FIX */, item.left, item.width),
				isOverElement = isOverElementHeight && isOverElementWidth,
				verticalDirection = this._getDragVerticalDirection(),
				horizontalDirection = this._getDragHorizontalDirection();

		if (!isOverElement)
				return false;

		return this.floating ?
				( ((horizontalDirection && horizontalDirection == "right") || verticalDirection == "down") ? 2 : 1 )
				: ( verticalDirection && (verticalDirection == "down" ? 2 : 1) );

	}
});

I updated my example to show that it fixes the problem in my situation, here is the link: http://jsfiddle.net/MaherSalam/u5kPn/5/

I know this fix doesn't handle the source of the problem, but I hope it helps you guys even a little fixing it.

This doesn't seem valid. If the handles are outside of the element, why are you using pointer intersection?

Thanks for taking the time to contribute to the jQuery UI project! I can no longer reproduce the issue described. http://jsfiddle.net/u5kPn/3/

If you can still reproduce it, please feel free to reply to this ticket with a test case showing the problem. Thanks!