Clipboard

[reactiveui]

Clipboard

[anaisbetts]

@rzhw Meh, who cares about Windows Phone. What I'm on the fence about is, should the clipboard be at the ViewModel layer (i.e. Splat is a library primarily for writing platform-independent ViewModel code). I could be swayed either way. Thoughts?

[rzhw]

Good point. My need for clipboard support isn’t too big, so thoughts:

• Idea of vm is to be layer between view + model(s); clipboard could be thought of another model, so it shouldn't be part of helper code for vms
• But there already is image loading/saving. Could also argue images on FS/bundle are also a model. So clipboard is another model that can be supported
• Problem of common interface; Cocoa has multiple pasteboards, WinRT + WPF have different clipboard APIs, there's different data formats that need support, WinPho can't be supported. Needing feature checking = :(
• But images already has a common interface. For clipboard baseline of get+set text, img, richtext, binary should be fine. Throw exceptions instead of requiring feature checks?

[anaisbetts]

How about something like:

public enum ClipboardContentType {
    Text,
    Html,
    Url,
    Image,
    Binary,
}

public interface IClipboard 
{
    ClipboardContentType? ContentType { get; }   // returns null if clipboard empty

    Task<byte[]> Get();
    Task Set(byte[] data, ClipboardContentType = Binary);
};

On top of Get and Set, you could make extension methods for strings, images, etc etc.

[rzhw]

Hm, base of just byte[]/Stream might not be possible, looking through docs for the WPF Clipboard class it looks like it's only possible to get data in predefined formats, seems to be same for WinRT (GetContent/DataPackageView)

[rzhw]

From some quick reading, looks possible for Cocoa

From the selection, identify or obtain the object or the binary data corresponding to the object.

Binary data must be encapsulated in an NSData object. If you’re going to write another type of object to the pasteboard, it must be a property-list object—that is, an object of one of the following classes: NSString, NSArray, NSDictionary, NSDate, NSNumber, or NSURL. (For more on property-list objects, see Property List Programming Guide.)

and Android

Quickview

A clipboard-based framework for copying and pasting data.
Supports both simple and complex data, including text strings, complex data structures, text and binary stream data, and application assets.

[anaisbetts]

Hm, base of just byte[]/Stream might not be possible, looking through docs for the WPF Clipboard class it looks like it's only possible to get data in predefined formats

You should be able to roll through all of the possible binary formats via "ContainsFormat" and see if any of them can be represented as binary (most of them can be).

[anaisbetts]

If not, I'd extend it to either text or binary

[rzhw]

I think coming back to this, it might be better suited to a separate library since doing all the abstraction looks like quite a big task, or at least until something usable comes out.