Customising Clipboard Use

Source Code

Code Libraries

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Customising Clipboard Use

Receive clipboard change notifications and get full control over reading, writing and adding formats

NOTE: this code has been superceded by the version at the new site.

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Simple, Notification Driven Clipboard Viewer

Download the Custom Clipboard classes and sample (11kb)
Download the RTF Format Clipboard Copy and Paste sample (26kb)

&nbsp	Before you Begin		&nbsp
&nbsp		This project requires the SSubTmr.DLL component. Make sure you have loaded and registered this before trying the project.	&nbsp

Introduction
The VB Clipboard object gives you quick and easy access to simple clipboard functions. But the Win32 API clipboard object offers a lot more flexibility and functionality. Notable omissions from the VB Clipboard object are:

It cannot hook into the Clipboard Viewer notification system, so you can't get events when the clipboard changes. Clipboard change events are very useful in an application particularly when you are trying to code a Paste toolbar button.
Strict limitation on formats which can be retrieved. You are limited to Text, Pictures and Metafiles. However, there are lots of other formats, and some are extremely useful. For example:
- The file copy/paste format used in Explorer (FileList and FileName formats). Allow your app to share files with Explorer easily!
- The HTML Format pasted by IE4 and above. When you copy a section from a web page in IE, IE puts the data on the clipboard in text, RTF and HTML formats (and some other private or OLE binary formats). The HTML format gives you a frament of HTML code for the selected item, which is great if you're writing web pages.
- Rich Text Format. It would be nice to be able to choose whether to paste RTF or Text in a RichTextBox control. But you can't do it in VB.
- OwnerLink format. This tells you what program pasted the object onto the clipboard. If you can read it, you can make intelligent decisions about what to paste from the clipboard. For example, Excel will often paste a bitmap and a metafile of an object. The metafile is tiny in size compared with the bitmap and it would be much better to use this if storage is at a premium.
You can't define your own private formats, even if you only want to include text in them. Private formats are extremely useful in applications which can paste data in multiple formats. Normally your application will understand more about the data than other applications on the system. But you still want to put information on the clipboard in standard formats such as Text so users can easily paste into Word, Excel etc. (Of course, you really want to paste in RTF as well...) This normally leads to a compromise where cut/copy/paste in your own application can't maintain all its data because it has to provide a friendly format for data sharing.

This project provides two new clipboard classes which break all of these limitations. With these classes you can hook into clipboard change notifications and have complete access to all clipboard formats, both read (paste) and write (cut/copy).

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The Clipboard Change Notification Class (cClipboardViewer)
An application can be notified of changes in the data stored in the clipboard by registering itself as a Win32 Clipboard Viewer. Having done this, the application is then notified of changes in the clipboard by the WM_DRAWCLIPBOARD message. Your application becomes part of a chain of applications on the system which respond to this message, and is responsible for forwarding the message after reading it to the next application along. To do this, your application must store the next window along in the chain to forward messages to and also respond to the WM_CHANGECBCHAIN message which is sent whenever any other clipboard viewer on the system is added or removed to ensure the next window along is valid.

This functionality is provided in the download code by the cClipboardViewer class. This uses the Subclassing and Timer DLL to intercept WM_DRAWCLIPBOARD and WM_CHANGECBCHAIN messages and to provide the required message passing and chain fixing functions.

To use this class you only need to make two calls:

InitClipboardChangeNotification
To attach your application to the clipboard viewer notification chain
StopClipboardChangeNotification
To remove your application. Note this is called automatically when the class terminates.

When notification is on, the class raises the ClipboardChanged event whenever the clipboard changes. Your application can then query the clipboard contents using the next class to work out what to do.

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The Custom Clipboard read/write class (cCustomClipboard)
This class encapsulates the Win32 API Clipboard functions. The following table details the methods and properties of the class:

&nbsp	Method	Description	&nbsp
&nbsp	AddFormat	Adds a custom clipboard format and returns its ID if successful, otherwise returns 0.	&nbsp
&nbsp	ClearClipboard	Clears the contents of the clipboard.	&nbsp
&nbsp	ClipboardClose	Closes the clipboard if the class has it open. Always call this after a call to ClipboardOpen. Whilst the class has the clipboard open, other applications cannot write to the clipboard.	&nbsp
&nbsp	ClipboardOpen	Opens the clipboard for read/write access. You must call this before attempting to access or put data into the clipboard.	&nbsp
&nbsp	FormatCount	Returns the number of formats currently available on the clipboard.	&nbsp
&nbsp	FormatIDForName	Returns the Clipboard ID for a specified Clipboard format name. This does the opposite of the FormatName property.	&nbsp
&nbsp	FormatName	Returns the Clipboard format name for a given ID. This does the opposite of the FormatIDForName property.	&nbsp
&nbsp	GetBinaryData	Returns a byte array containing the clipboard contents for a specified format ID. You must have called ClipboardOpen before calling this function.	&nbsp
&nbsp	GetClipboardMemoryHandle	Returns a Win32 API global memory handle to the data in the clipboard for a specified format ID. You must have called ClipboardOpen before calling this function.	&nbsp
&nbsp	GetCurrentFormatID	After calling the GetCurrentFormats method, you can use this to retrieve the format ID for the Indexed entry in the format list.	&nbsp
&nbsp	GetCurrentFormatName	Similar to GetCurrentFormatID, but returns the Name of the format for the Indexed entry in the format list.	&nbsp
&nbsp	GetCurrentFormats	Enumerates all the names and IDs of items currently on the clipboard, and returns the number of items. You can subsequently retrieve the names and IDs using the GetCurrentFormatName and GetCurrentFormatID properties.	&nbsp
&nbsp	GetFileList	If the clipboard contains the file format CF_HDROP (i.e. files cut or copied from explorer) then this function will return the list of files associated with the format.	&nbsp
&nbsp	GetTextData	Similar to GetBinaryData except it returns a string containing the clipboard data rather than a byte array. Use when you know the clipboard format can be read in text format.	&nbsp
&nbsp	HasCurrentFormat	Following a call to GetCurrentFormats, this property returns whether a specified clipboard format ID is in the list of formats. See also IsDataAvailableForFormat.	&nbsp
&nbsp	IsDataAvailableForFormat	Returns whether a specified clipboard format ID is available by querying the clipboard itself. The clipboard must have been opened with the ClipboardOpen method before this is called.	&nbsp
&nbsp	IsDataAvailableForFormatName	Similar to the IsDataAvailableForFormat method except works on a specified clipboard format name rather than an ID.	&nbsp
&nbsp	SetBinaryData	The write equivalent of GetBinaryData.	&nbsp
&nbsp	SetClipboardMemoryHandle	The write equivalent of GetClipboardMemoryHandle.	&nbsp
&nbsp	SetFileList	The write equivalent of GetFileList.	&nbsp
&nbsp	SetTextData	The write equivalent of GetTextData.	&nbsp

To see how to use these methods to implement clipboard copy and paste for non-standard formats, download the RTF Clipboard Copy and Paste sample. This demonstrates how to add complete custom clipboard format in about 10 or so lines of code.

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