How to prevent row selection when dragging/dropping to a new table?

[uncvrd]

Hi there! I was curious if it is possible to prevent row selection on the rows when dropped in to a new table?

The example on the docs shows this pretty clearly: https://react-spectrum.adobe.com/react-aria/Table.html#drag-between-tables

When you drag one row (without selecting the checkbox) and drop it in the other table, the other table automatically selects this newly dropped row. This may be nice in some circumstances, but I'm curious if it's possible to prevent that capability?

Example from docs

Screen.Recording.2025-08-25.at.1.20.21.PM.mov

Same behavior occurring in my app

Screen.Recording.2025-08-25.at.1.21.22.PM.mov

I would like to disable auto select on drop because it triggers the "oh you have items selected" prompt in my sidebar when I drop the items and the user would have to click "cancel" to deselect which is kind of cumbersome. Am I missing something? Thanks!

[snowystinger]

Should there be selection in the table you're dropping on? It looks like maybe not, I don't see a check box.

Otherwise, you could possibly put it into a controlled state and just not respond to the 'onSelectionChange' when it's DnD?

[uncvrd]

@snowystinger thanks for the quick response! actually yea there would be selection on the destination location, but the user would just click on multiple items in the folder to then drag them to a different folder

I suppose the idea to just ignore the ids could work as I already use the onSelectionChange handler on the folder component (when dragging between folders). I just thought it was interesting that you dont necessarily have to select an item to drag it and drop it in a destination but then it automatically selects it on drop 🤔

It's no big problem, just thought the logic was a little interesting and was hoping it was configurable, kind of like how we have selectionBehavior

[snowystinger]

It's there for a few reasons. One that I recall off the top of my head is to easily see everything that was dropped in there, this is the same in applications like Mac Finder.

@reidbarber or @LFDanLu I think you two worked on this most, do you recall any discussions about allowing this sort of behaviour being problematic?

[LFDanLu]

Not necessarily anything that was problematic about this behavior. Like @snowystinger said, this behavior is to help give feed back to the user that a drop operation occurred, especially if they were dropping via keyboard operations and/or were using a screen reader since they may not have a good recollection of exactly what they had selected before the drop occurred (i.e. selecting disparate items in a long list/ from many folders).

[uncvrd]

@LFDanLu @snowystinger thank you both for your insight. The default behavior makes sense for general use, I don't think it makes sense to bake my idea in to the implementation, so I'll design a workaround.