Drag & Drop Support

You can now define a Widget as the target of a drag & drop operation.

Note: Screen shots and more detailed information will be provided as these details are finalized.

Overview:

You can now define certain Widget types (Buttons, Labels, others?) as targets of a drag & drop operation. This means the user can drag a file or other object to an Appx Widget & drop it.

Creating Drop Target

Define a field on your image, then use the GUI Attributes to set the Control type to 'BUTTON'. Fill in the other attributes as desired (including which Option to fire), and at the end of the Tooltip, add the string @SDND=dir or @SDND=file. The 'dir' option will allow the user to drop a file or directory. If they drop a directory, Appx will recursively populate the --- DROP* files with all the files in that directory. If they drop a file, it will populate --- DROP* with just that file's info. Note that Email messages and attachments in Emails can also be dropped.

The @SDND technique will be replaced with Widget attributes in the final release.

Drop Target at Runtime

When the user drops an object (file/folder/email message/etc) on the drop target, Appx will populate 2 files and then fire the specified --- OPTION. The files are: --- DROPINFO which will contain one record for every object dropped and --- DROPPROP which will contain multiple records for each object dropped. Both of these files are keyed by the --- WIDGET IMAGE KEY, so if you have more than one drop target on your image, you can differeniate them. Alternatively, you can have the different drop targets fire different Option Numbers.

The --- DROPINFO PATHNAME contains the full path to the object the user dropped. The --- DROPROP file is a child file of --- DROPINFO and contains multiple records for each object. The specific data varies depending on the type of object dropped. The --- DROPPROP KEYWORD identifies a specific property, and --- DROPPROP VALUE contains the value of that property.

For example, if a file from the users desktop is dropped, --- DROPINFO PATHNAME might contain something like "C:\Documents and Settings\jean\Desktop\VolumeC.txt" and --- DROPPROP might contain the following keywords and values:

Keyword Value
file VolumeC.txt
size 4242
type File

An Email message might have the following ---- DROPROP keywords and values:

Keyword Value
Categories Blue Category (controlled by user's Outlook settings)
From Microsoft Office Outlook (human readable 'from' address)
Received Tue 12:40 PM
Size 6 KB
Subject *SPAM* Microsoft Office Outlook Test Message
file SPAM Microsoft Office Outlook Test Message.msg
size 18944
type OutlookMsgItem


DROPINFO PATHNAME would contain the path to open and read the dropped item.

Note that these files are cleared every time the user drops an object on your drop target. If you do not process or save the information each time, the previous data will be lost.

Comments:

Read what other users have said about this page or add your own comments.


-- JeanNeron - 2012-06-14

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Topic revision: r2 - 2012-06-14 - JeanNeron
 
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