Swing Hacks

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Chapter 9, Drag-and-Drop

#67 Handle Dropped Images

HACK

H A C K

#67

Handle Dropped Images

Hack #67

I spy, with my little drop( ) method, something that doesn’t support

DataFlavor.imageFlavor...arrrgh!

Handling drag-and-drop from native applications [Hack #66] can be tricky

because they’re not particularly consistent about how they represent the

data being transferred to your application. Now, let’s say you want to accept

dropped images—not image files, but actual images inside of browser win-

dows, digital photo viewers, word processing and page-layout applications,

etc. There’s a constant in

DataFlavor for images, so surely you can count on

that being a flavor offered to you by the

Transferable, right?

No, of course not. That would be too easy.

Using the

dumpDataFlavors( ) strategy of the earlier URL hack, I checked out

the

DataFlavors offered by images dropped from some popular Windows

and Mac applications. The results are pretty interesting—check out

Table 9-2.

Table 9-2. DataFlavor offerings for images on various platforms

Application/platform DataFlavors

Preview 2.1 / Mac OS X 1

GraphicConverter 4.6 / Mac OS X 1

Finder / Mac OS X 1

Safari 1.3 / Mac OS X 55

Firefox 1.0 / Mac OS X 57

QuickTime Player 6.5 / Mac OS X 1

AppleWorks 6.2.9 / Mac OS X 1

MarinerWrite 3.6.4 / Mac OS X 1

iPhoto 4.0.3 / Mac OS X 1

Explorer / Windows XP 1

MSIE 6.0 / Windows XP 27

Firefox 1.0 / Windows XP 80

Paint / Windows XP N/A

Windows Picture and Fax Viewer / Windows XP N/A

Windows Media Player / Windows XP N/A

QuickTime Player 6.5.1 / Windows XP N/A

QuickTime Picture Viewer 6.5.1 / Windows XP N/A