Advanced PowerBuilder

Drag And Drop

The most widely used method for transferring data between applications has been the Clipboard. With the Clipboard method, the user chooses the Copy operation while in the object application, moves to the target application, and chooses Paste to put the object in place. Although effective, a more natural way to exchange data between applications is simply to click an object, drag it to its destination, and drop it in place. OLE supports this "drag and drop" functionality of objects in addition to the traditional Clipboard functionality.

Drag and drop eliminates the traditional barriers between applications. Instead of perceiving window frames as walls surrounding data, users are able to freely drag information to and from a variety of applications. Drag and drop makes compound documents easier to create and manage because it provides an interactive model that more closely resembles how people interact with physical objects.

• Inter-window dragging: Dragging data is from one application window into another application window, is called inter-window dragging.
• Inter-object dragging: Objects nested within other objects can be dragged out of their containing objects to another window or to another container object. Conversely, objects can be dragged to other objects and dropped inside them.
• Dropping over icons: Objects can be dragged over the desktop to system resource icons such as printers and mailboxes. The appropriate action will be taken with the object, depending on the type of resource the icon represents.