dragging FROM LiveCode to external apps

[stan]

Dear Livecoders,

I'm building an app that makes use of Livecode's drag & drop facilities. So far, I've successfully built an app that can happily receive stuff dragged onto it from external apps/OS, determine what sort of thing is being dropped and respond accordingly.

However, I can't figure out how to create the reverse of it - i.e. dragging stuff from Livecode to the external environment for processing by the OS or another app. I can successfully get my app to copy various types of control and populate the relevant clipboard data keys and this works fine for the OS and most external apps but I can't figure out how to parallel this copy/paste with drag & drop.

If I drag a control/object from Livecode to somewhere outside the application I don't get the mouse pointer changing to indicate something is being dragged as you might do when dragging from another application even if i set the allowabledragactions on the control appropriately.

Any ideas?

Stan

[Klaus]

Hi stan,

...
However, I can't figure out how to create the reverse of it - i.e. dragging stuff from Livecode to the external environment for processing by the OS or another app. I can successfully get my app to copy various types of control and populate the relevant clipboard data keys and this works fine for the OS and most external apps but I can't figure out how to parallel this copy/paste with drag & drop.

you may need to parse the keys of the DRAGDATA array, see dictionary, and act accordingly.

...
If I drag a control/object from Livecode to somewhere outside the application I don't get the mouse pointer changing to indicate something is being dragged as you might do when dragging from another application even if i set the allowabledragactions on the control appropriately.

Nut sure, but I'm afraid LC controls are a format tha external apps cannot understand, maybe that is the problem?

Best

Klaus

[AndyP]

A lot depends if the receiving app acceps drag, drag Drop.

Try this experiment. Im on Windows.

Create a field, add some text.

Add this code to the field

Code: Select all

on dragStart
   set the dragData to the selectedText of me
end dragStart

Open Notepad (Windows?)

Select some text from the field, drag and drop into Notepad..

Works here.

[Klaus]

On a Mac, Drag'n'Drop of text works without any scripting right out of the box.
I tried from a LC field to "TextEdit.app".

[AndyP]

On a Mac, Drag'n'Drop of text works without any scripting right out of the box.
I tried from a LC field to "TextEdit.app".

yep, just tried on Windows and it works.

[stan]

Thanks for such fast responses!

...and problem solved - setting the dragdata appropriately works - and you can use dragdata["file"] and drag data["image"] to drag files & images as well as text.

Stan