Pasting my own dogfood, part 3 (14 Apr 2006)

Last time around, I discussed a slightly kludgy approach for automatic testing of clipboard code, which was based on clipbrd.exe and some VBscript code. That wasn't bad, but I wasn't really satisfied. After all, the original goal was to write rock-solid unit tests for clipboard code. I wanted a more reliable tool to copy data from and to the clipboard in arbitrary formats. I needed more control. And, most important of all, I was in the mood for reinventing wheels (really fancy ones, of course).

The key Win32 APIs for clipboard handling are SetClipboardData and GetClipboardData. Their signatures are as follows:

  HANDLE SetClipboardData(UINT uFormat, HANDLE hMem);

  HANDLE GetClipboardData(UINT uFormat);

So when you post to the clipboard, all you need to specify is a format and a memory handle, as it seems! This looks so trivial that I had my strategy laid out almost immediately: I would allocate a global memory block using GlobalAlloc. Then I would read some clipboard data from a file into that block, and finally call SetClipboardData - like in the following code:

HANDLE ReadFileToMemory(const TCHAR *filename)
{
  FILE *f;
  errno_t error = _tfopen_s(&f, filename, _T("rb"));
  if (error) {
    _ftprintf(stderr, _T("ERROR: Cannot open %s\n"), filename);
    return 0;
  }

  // get size of file
  fseek(f, 0, SEEK_END);
  long size=ftell(f);
  fseek(f, 0, SEEK_SET);

  // allocate memory
  HANDLE hMem = ::GlobalAlloc(GMEM_MOVEABLE, size);
  if (!hMem) {
    fclose(f);
    return 0;
  }

  LPVOID mem = ::GlobalLock(hMem);
  if (!mem) {
    fclose(f);
    ::GlobalFree(hMem);
    return 0;
  }

  // read the file into memory
  size_t bytes_read = fread(mem, 1, size, f);
  fclose(f);
  ::GlobalUnlock(mem);
  if (bytes_read != size) {
    ::GlobalFree(hMem);
    return 0;
  }

  return hMem;
}

bool FileToClipboard(TCHAR *filename, UINT clipid, HWND ownerWindow)
{
  if (::OpenClipboard(ownerWindow)) {
    HANDLE hClip = ReadFileToMemory(filename);
    ::EmptyClipboard();
    HANDLE h = ::SetClipboardData(clipid, hClip);
    ::CloseClipboard();
    ::DestroyWindow(owner);
    return true;
  }
  return false;
}

And the reverse code to get data from the clipboard and save it to a file would be just as simple:

  FILE *f = fopen(filename, "wb");
  if (f) {
    HANDLE hClip = GetClipboardData(clipID);  
                   // clipID culled from looping over
                   // available formats using EnumClipboardFormats
    void *pData = (void*)GlobalLock(hClip);
    if (pData) {
      SIZE_T sz = ::GlobalSize(pData);
      if (sz) {
        size_t written = fwrite(pData, 1, sz, f);
        ret = (written == sz);
      }
    }
    ::GlobalUnlock(hClip);
    fclose(f);
  }

Piece of cake! Mission accomplished! I slapped the usual boilerplate code for a console app onto the above, and ran my first successful tests: I could read text from the clipboard, and post text to it just fine.

However, several formats stubbornly refused to cooperate. In particular, the really useful stuff, like metafiles. Or bitmaps. What was going on?

When calling GetClipboardData for these formats, the code that interprets the returned handle as a global memory handle flatly falls on its face. It turns out that I had jumped to conclusions way too early when I read the first few lines of the SetClipboardData documentation - some of those clipboard handles are actually anything but memory handles! Examples for such formats:

• CF_ENHMETAFILE, CF_DSPENHMETAFILE
• CF_METAFILEPICT, CF_DSPMETAFILEPICT
• CF_BITMAP, CF_DSPBITMAP
• CF_PALETTE

And then, of course, there are whole classes of clipboard formats which I had not even explored yet, such as application-defined formats.

Next time: How I learnt to peacefully coexist with all the various classes of clipboard formats.