ContentReceptor? PasteTarget? Placeholder control for receiving paste/drag-n-drop text/image content

[michael-hawker]

Problem Statement

A relatively common task (albeit difficult to implement properly across UWP and WinUI 3 apps) is allowing users to paste content from their clipboard, especially an image, into an application. Or drag-n-drop a file into the app as well (or from another location in their app).

Idea

By having an easy drop-in-place control that can represent a target area for a user to drag a file to or paste an image into, it can enable a wide-variety of scenarios and input into an application, while abstracting away the nuances of how to get various data from different places.

The control should provide a nice default style and look-and-feel, but also be flexible to encompass being used as a wrapper around other content and directing content to other locations (possibly via events that the developer uses?)

Open Questions/Thoughts

• Is there more beyond text, images, files?
• Bools for allowing certain operations like AllowDrop and AllowPaste?
• Some sort of enum or boolean properties for AllowImage, AllowText, etc... Maybe better to have as an enum for allowed content types? Maybe they're flags so it can be AllowableContent="Image,Text"?
• Have events like ReceivedImage, ReceivedText, ReceivedFile which just provides nice callbacks when content is pasted or dragged (i.e. 'received') by the control and provides the content directly as a string, BitmapImage, and StorageFile?
• Should events be intercept-able/handle-able or is allow filters + post-events enough?
• How much text do we display, do we truncate? Is there an option to show as a 'file icon' (do we have different images there or is that to the developer...)?
• Option/Add-on to have button and open file picker to select a file as well, trifecta paste/drag-n-drop/filepicker... 🙂

In general, I like the idea of this control and see a lot of potential, but think there's a fine-line in scoping we need to hit in aggregating these types of operations and simplifying in/out-of-app communication and preview/display of the result, etc...

[niels9001]

Simple Icon File Maker has a UI that could benefit from this idea!

[michael-hawker]

Thanks for the example Niels, yeah, this kind of placeholder UI is in many apps. Forgot to call out the button to select a file/image as well, that would be another add-on/option to the component.

[michael-hawker]

Link to some API docs: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/app-to-app/

Wonder if the share out/in contracts could be useful to integrate somewhere here as well? @niels9001?