🚀 go-pugleaf

Chris Thornton wrote:

> >Thing is, I get a WM_RENDERFORMAT request for the CF_TEXT format as soon
> >as I call CloseClipboard().
> >
> >Is this 'by design' and unavoidable? Or is there some way I can force
> >Windows to delay rendering the CF_TEXT until it's requested, too?
> 
> If there are any clipboard utilities installed, such as my own ClipMate,
> they'll ask for the data as soon as its posted.  You'll get the same
> behavior as if you were running clipbrd.exe, which auto-pastes everything
> into itself.
> But wait, you say.  You're not running any clipboard viewers?  Ha!
> Some applications, for apparently no good reason, paste TEXT into themselves
> so that they can light up their menus and toolbar buttons.  It should be
> enough that they just query the clipboard to see if CF_TEXT is available,
> but certain apps don't stop there.  They are looking for TEXT with a
> particular structure to it, such as to see if the text contains things
> they're interested in.  Such as decriptions of forms, buttons, and other
> controls....
> 
> Yes, you're likely being burned by Delphi3 or Delphi2.  And so have I.
> They both auto-paste CF_TEXT into themselves, and I'd suspect other Borland
> development environments do so as well.

Oh, that makes sense, unfortunately. I found that the request for
rendering was being generated inside of the call to CloseClipboard() -
and that is the logical place for clipboard viewer messages to be
generated.

It seems a poor design for Delphi and BCB to look for CF_TEXT with a
particular structure, though. It would seem to make more sense to use a
private, binary format, and to use delayed rendering in the relatively
rare cases where the user pastes a widget into a text file. Then they
wouldn't have to check every piece of pasted text.

Unfortunately, since I use Delphi for a Web editor - and, more
generally, since one will typically be copying source code out of the
IDE onto the clipboard - it seems that this is a problem I just have to
live with. The best solution is probably what I temporized on last night
- render HTML (CF_TEXT) immediately, but delay RTF rendering until it's
actually requested.
 
> Rather than using delayed rendering, maybe you should just do nothing until
> the user clicks?  Otherwise, if you're auto-pasting all text into yourself,
> then you're setting yourself up for "wars" with any clipboard enhancement
> utilities out there.
> 
> I'd just sit idle, until the user clicks.  Then, grab the data, and flip
> your icon to a "busy" state.  When done, give a little beep, flip your to
> "done", put your data onto the clipboard, and then the user can paste.

Umm, that's what I *was* doing. I didn't write a clipboard viewer that
converts all text that gets pasted! The problem is that
parsing+rendering+rendering on the user's double-click can be slow.
That's why I want(ed) to reduce it to parse-on-double-click,
render-on-paste.

-- 

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                               and my homeschool resource pages.