OS4.3.1 Drag and drop fields

[Bastiaan Olij]

Hey Kelly,

It is kinda weird though. Mail itself is bog standard. You would assume
a mail client, when dragging mail, would just deliver the original mail
source text (or at least give access to it somehow) and let whatever
product accept the data figure out what to do with it.

I've tried to get this to work as well with no success :( and as you
say, even if we did, every mail client does it differently and you end
up having to support a zillion approaches:(

Greetz,

Bas

Kelly Burgess wrote:
> Hi Andrew,
>
>> I have a field that accepts drag and drop text and works fine within
>> Omnis but I am trying to now drag text from an email (OSX Mail) and
>> drop it into that field without any luck.  Is there anything I am
>> missing here.
>
> No, you're not missing anything.  Applications use 'drag flavors' and
> 'promises' to describe data, and every one of them has slightly
> different behavior and data types.
>
> I managed to get OS X Mail drag/drop working by using a custom event
> handler external that queried back to Mail and fleshed out some
> details about the dropped flavor, but was never able to follow it back
> to an exact message - so I kludged it by using an Applescript to ask
> Mail to describe the current selection, which is assumedly what was
> just dragged.  Using the combined info, I was able to come up with the
> full path of the message file, which I could then read and import.
>
> Then along came OS X 10.5 and a new version of Mail, and my solution
> broke.  Still haven't returned to it to figure out why.  And if I do,
> it might break again with 10.6 Mail.  But the other point is, none of
> what I did was of any use with mail dragged from Eudora, or a
> Netscape-based browser/mail reader.  None of them make it easy, and no
> two are the same.  Eudora stores messages inside larger mailbox files,
> not as individual files like Mail does - and it stores attachments
> separately, rather than as part of a multipart message like Mail.
>
> I don't blame Omnis for this problem.  And it's probably hard to get
> the different mail client vendors to agree on some standards for
> drag/drop, since they'd prefer their competition to just go away or to
> adopt their standard... to which the competitor replies that their set
> of flavors doesn't map well to the others, they don't want to have
> their innovation stifled, etc...
>
> Kelly
> +
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-- 
Kindest Regards,

Bastiaan Olij
e-mail/MSN: bastiaan at basenlily.nl
web: http://www.basenlily.nl
Skype: Mux213
http://www.linkedin.com/in/bastiaanolij