Chapter 24. Drag-and-Drop
Drag-and-drop of icons in the Finder goes back to the beginnings of the Macintosh user interface, and certain conventions are now so customary as to be almost subconscious: to copy or move a file to a different folder, drag its icon into the folder; to open a document with a certain application, drag its icon onto the applicationâs icon. But system-level drag-and-drop of data, within an application and from one application to another, was not introduced until about 1994. At first, the technology behind this was called Macintosh Drag-and-Drop; now, it is more often called the Drag Manager.[130] Drag-and-drop is an intuitive and easy way to move data, and you may well want to consider implementing it in your application.
REALbasic implements drag-and-drop by means of the
DragItem
class, which works very much like the Clipboard class (see Chapter 23). But donât be misled by this
comparison! Drag-and-drop does not use the clipboard; thatâs
one of its advantages. A DragItem is itself the repository of the
data being moved; metaphorically, itâs like a suitcase,
carrying the data inside it from one place to another. Like the
Clipboard, a DragItemâs data is identified by a format label,
such as 'TEXT'
or 'PICT'
. There
can be more than one piece of data, and (unlike the Clipboard) there
can be more than one piece of data with the same format.
Three separate situations must be considered:
You have a control or window, and you want the user to be able ...
Get REALBasic: TDG, 2nd Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.