If you are using the sortable feature of the jQuery library, you will likely want a way to get the order of the elements. You can do this very easily using one of the built in events. The following code will obtain the element order for a sortable div and output the data to the console.

<ul id="#sortable">
	<li data-id="1">Item 1</li>
	<li data-id="2">Item 2</li>
</ul>

$( "#sortable" ).sortable(
{
	stop: function( event, ui ) 
	{
		var idsInOrder = $("#visualpreview").sortable('toArray', { attribute: 'data-id' });
		console.log(idsInOrder);
	}
});

The output will be a simple numeric array e.g. [1,2]. You can loop over this array and do what you need to do. You can also save these to a comma delimited string if you need to submit the order of a sortable list through a form.