Window Drag and Drop (bodge)

[szewczak]

This VI demonstrates how you can bodge a VI to accept drag and drops of files and folders just like a path control (without losing any mouse click/move event functionality).

Path controls have an API for dragging and dropping Files/folders from the OS, or correctly formatted strings from Excel. While an acceptable drag-and-drop operation is underway the path control adds a dotted box to the control (I'm calling this a target box). However this behavior is not available for other objects such as panes or other controls. So Bodging time.

DragandDropBodge.vi (attached to the original lavag.org post) has a transparent Path control (set to 'Scale object with pane') that in all the use cases where a drag and drop is possible is set to Visible=True, and in all the use cases where the user would click on an object within the pane is set to Visible=False. I am using a shift register and the Timeout case to Visible=False the Path control, but for a more complex VI or when you have an existing need for the Timeout Case, you can manage this with a user event.

Other implementations:

This could be used to bodge drag-and-drop for a xy graph or other indicator instead of the pane at large. Or by capturing the cursor position at the moment of 'value update' for the path control a drag and drop could update a specific line in a tree/table/array.

 

Hope this helps when you are searching with the same keywords I was and found no solutions!

NSz

DragandDropBodge.vi