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This class I wrote to encapsulate copying custom data from or to clipboard. I was in a situation where, software I develop must have feature to copy or paste data in particular format to clipboard. After googling around, I found solution and started writing its implementation and encapsulated it into a class.

Copy data from or to clipboard.

Design

This class is derived from TPersistent and maintaining an internal buffer where its lifetime is managed by class. To make it flexible, this class is only responsible to copy data. Data format and how to interpret data is defined and implemented by application.

We need following units : classes, windows, clipbrd. We name class that we are going to develop TClipboardCopier. This class will have following methods:

• Create (constructor)
• Destroy (destructor)

• AssignTo(Dst:TPersistent)
• Assign(src:TPersistent)

clipCopier.Assign(Clipboard);

clipboard.Assign(clipCopier);

• AssignToClipboard(Dst:TClipboard)
• AssignClipboard(src:TClipboard);

• procedure SaveToStream(Stream:TStream)
• procedure LoadFromStream(Stream:TStream)

LoadFromStream and SaveToStream is used to copy data from and to internal buffer of instance of TClipboardCopier class.

We will define a property:

• Format :word

Holds clipboard data format returned by Windows API, RegisterClipboardFormat(). Application must register clipboard format first.