Is it possible to copy text from a formatted MS Word document into a Flex application? We are in the process of converting a VB.net application to a Flex web application, and one of the fundamental ways the users move text into the Rich Text Editor is by copying the text and formatting to the clipboard and then into the VB app, which works fine. However when we do it with Flex, all the formatting is dropped.
Is there a way with Flex 3.0 to keep the formatting when copying from the Clipboard, as the text could conceivably come from PDFs/Excel/Word/Powerpoint/etc.?
I’ve searched around on here, and asked the mighty Google Wizard, however it is hard to decipher if there is a way with Flex or if it is just easier to tell everyone to use something like TinyMCE.
No this isn’t possible in any simple way. I found a little util out there that will give the raw data shown in the clipboard for windows that’s somewhat useful for debugging this issue “google it” easy find. It appears you even have some ability to specify the format you’d like to pull from the clipboard however there’s nothing built in to flex that will do the parsing/translation into rich text that Flex will accept. Also to note in newer versions of Flex you have more flexibility with regard to text but there’s not a 1-1 match between components available in Flex and those in the Microsoft office suite of tools.
Adobe clipboard documentation
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/as3/dev/WS0579B9EE-CF1E-434e-A386-A04DC7786FC9.html
Stackoverflow post with a similar goal
Cannot get file data from the clipboard using Flex