Interact with System clipboard from applet.

Dev Shed Forums Sponsor:

October 13th, 2006, 02:27 PM

kicken

Wiser? Not exactly.

Dev Shed God 1st Plane (5500 - 5999 posts)

Join Date: May 2001

Location: Bonita Springs, FL

Posts: 5,654

Folding Points: 2670569 Folding Title: Super Ultimate Folder - Level 6

Time spent in forums: 2 Months 2 Weeks 2 Days 5 h 1 m 44 sec
Reputation Power: 3436

Interact with System clipboard from applet.

Hi

This may not even be possible, but I'm not sure. I am trying to make an app that will be used to view documents online. It should be possible for people to copy the text from these documents to another program if they want, but I need to be able to control what they copy and append some information to the text (a citation really)

For example, say one were viewing this post and wanted to copy something out of it. The app should allow the copy, but add a citation after it so when pasted into the other program it looks like:

Quote:

"This may not even be possible, but I'm not sure."

Interact with System clipboard from applet. http://forums.devshed.com/... p1 13 Oct 2006

To do that I need to
1) Be able to set the system clipboard, which I can't do from an applet due to security restrictions (works as an app)

2) Intercept ctrl+c to run my own copy function which can create and append the citation text.

Is this possible at all using java, or would I be forced into doing something with activex or something else?

I'm thinking the first point should be possible, though I may need to sign the applet or something, which I don't know how to do and the info I have been able to find online seems to all be outdated or doesn't work anyway.

__________________
Recycle your old CD's, don't just trash them

Spidermonkey Tutorial;

If I helped out out, show some love with some reputation, or tip with Bitcoins to 1N645HfYf63UbcvxajLKiSKpYHAq2Zxud

October 14th, 2006, 09:18 PM

occam999

Contributing User

Join Date: Mar 2005

Posts: 191

Time spent in forums: 3 Days 11 h 26 m 59 sec
Reputation Power: 81

I'm no expert on Java applet security, but I suspect signing the applet may be the only way around this in pure Java.

Have you noticed that you can set and examine the clipboard contents in JavaScript?

Code:

function SetClipBoard(x) {
   window.clipboardData.setData("text",x);
}

You might be able to use something like this to pass data to/from your applet?

October 17th, 2006, 09:51 AM

kicken

Wiser? Not exactly.

Join Date: May 2001

Location: Bonita Springs, FL

Posts: 5,654

Time spent in forums: 2 Months 2 Weeks 2 Days 5 h 1 m 44 sec
Reputation Power: 3436

Signing the applet seems to have worked well. Incase anyone wants to know, here's a little .bat file I made which compiles the class, packes it in the archive and signs it. Might be useful to people looking to see how to sign an applet.

Code:

@echo off
echo Cleaning environment...
del *.class
del *.jar
echo Compiling...
javac applet1.java
if not %ERRORLEVEL% == 0 (
	echo Compile failed.
	goto done
)

echo Packaging
jar cvf MyApplet.jar .
echo Signing...
jarsigner MyApplet.jar mykey -keypass abcdef

if %ERRORLEVEL% == 0 (
	echo Running...
	start http://localhost:8008/java/applet1.html
) else (
	echo Signing failed
)


:done

You have to setup the key first, which you can see how to do that from this page in the sun documentation

Comments on this post

tfecw agrees!

Interact with System clipboard from applet.

Developer Shed Advertisers and Affiliates