Using JQuery Sortable toArray with connectWith; how to get IDs of all items?

Given n lists of m items that are Sortable across lists, how can I get an overall list of IDs for all items in all lists from top to bottom (including both sort participants and non-participants)?

My list of items looks something like this:

Category 1
- (id=a) Item 1A
- (id=b) Item 1B
Category 2
- (id=c) Item 2A
- (id=d) Item 2B
Category开发者_开发知识库 3
- (id=e) Item 3A
- (id=f) Item 3B

These items are Sortable across categories and connected via connectWith (see below for code). Item 2B, for example, may be dragged and dropped into Category 1.

I can get as far as using update and toArray to get IDs for the section being dragged from and the section being dragged to, but is there a clean way to access all of them? Do I need to build it manually somehow? How can I get a list of all the IDs in their current sort order?

If I drag Item 2B to the first position in Category 1, for example, I can get two array lists for two fires of the update, the first containing "d" (the list I moved from) and the second containing "c, a, b" (the list I moved to). How can I get a list containing "c, a, b, d, e, f"? This is happening on a button click, so I'm not restricted to update, if there's a better mechanism through which to get the information.

Here's a JFIDDLE demo of what I have so far.

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There doesn't seem to be a native function to do this, so I created a demo that iterates all the .sortable elements to create one array and log to the console in Chrome or Firefox with Firebug. I also changed the update to receive so it only fires once (see jQueryUI sortable documentation).

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Another way to do it is to just loop through all the sortable child elements and record their order.

$('.sortable').sortable({ 
    items: '> tr.child',
    connectWith: $('tbody'),
    receive: function(event, ui) {
        var myOrder = new Array();
        $(".sortable tr.child").each(function() {
            myOrder.push($(this).attr("id"));
        });
        console.log(myOrder.toString());  
    }
});

This has the added benefit of allowing adding and deleting sortable containers at any time -- this script will work regardless.