Should the same element provide navigation and interaction?

Question

I have a typical tree navigation with a property window on the right side which configures the selected element.

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Now this elements have to be assigned to another, think appointments to a calendar. My first thought was to have different pages in my app for editing the appointments and adding them to the calendar by Drag & Drop. But this leads to a lot of navigation between these pages especially when the user is changing the content of his appointments during laying them out on the calendar.

I thought about combining navigation and editing by making the elements on the left side Hyperlinks which when clicked upon open their property sheet. Further they would have a designated drag button on hover which slides in the the calendar from the right side when it is clicked.

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Is this a feasable approach or will this be too uncommon and confuse the user? Further what if I want to introduce reordering of the element by Drag & Drop? Is adding another Drag & Drop behavior too much? You could for instance go with the double dotted line in front of the items to initiate a drag which then would work in the list and the adjacent calendar.

Is there any UI which does something similar with success?

Answer 1

OneNote's Options menu uses something similar to what I think you describe above. Highlighting the entire item to appear as a tile would increase the drag and drop affordance you're looking for while still allowing users to click on the entire button to display the sub-page.