Question

I know the following question is a bit tricky, but I really need to solve it…

Imagine you have a form with a textbox-control (in my case a RichTextBox) on it.
Now you select a portion of text within this control, start a drag-event and drop the selected text OUTSIDE the form, right to some folder within the windows explorer, as for instance the desktop…

How can this be accomplished? I didn’t found something useful on the net besides the following link: http://forums.asp.net/t/1600192.aspx/1

All i know is that this kind of file-writing operation is called “scrap-file generation”.
Have someone a useful hint for me?

Answer 1

The FileDrop expects the files to exist and the drop just does a copy of the file. You will have to write your data out to a file and then pass that name to the DataObject. The below is just a demonstration and you will need to figure out how you write the files and clean everything up so you are not creating extra files on the user’s PC.

private void richTextBox1_MouseLeave(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    // If the left mouse button is down when leaving the rtb
    if (MouseButtons == MouseButtons.Left)
    {
        // Write everything to a temp file.
        System.IO.File.WriteAllText(@"z:\Temp\helloWorld.rtf", richTextBox1.SelectedRtf);
        string[] filenames = { @"z:\Temp\helloWorld.rtf" };
        DataObject obj = new DataObject();
        // Set the drag drop data with the FileDrop format
        obj.SetData(DataFormats.FileDrop, filenames);
        // Start the drag drop effect
        DoDragDrop(obj, DragDropEffects.All);
    }
}