How do I copy a file to the clipboard and paste it somewhere else?

Question

I have a listview with small thumbnails of images. Each image has a tag with it's full path in it.

With a rightclick menu the user can click COPY.

Then this code is excecuted:

Dim selectedfile As String

selectedfile = Me.lvFotos.SelectedItems(0).Tag


Dim dataobj As New DataObject(DataFormats.FileDrop, selectedfile)

Clipboard.Clear()
Clipboard.SetDataObject(dataobj)

Now when I click on my desktop to paste the file I get an exception error in VS2010:

An exception of type 'System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException' occurred in System.Windows.Forms.dll and wasn't handled before a managed/native boundary

Additional information: Invalid FORMATETC structure (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80040064 (DV_E_FORMATETC))

What am I doing wrong here?

rg. Eric

`Clipboard.SetText(lvFotos.SelectedItems(0).Tag.ToString)` I am not sure what you are doing with the rest of that code...if you have the name of the file, use it. — Ňɏssa Pøngjǣrdenlarp, Sep 15 '14 at 15:23
How would that work when I don't know the destination up front? — Eric, Sep 16 '14 at 13:19

score 4 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 15 '14 at 15:58

You could use directly My.Computer.FileSystem.CopyFile.

Dim source As String = lvFotos.SelectedItems(0).Tag
Dim destination As String = My.Computer.FileSystem.SpecialDirectories.Desktop & from.Substring(from.LastIndexOf("\"))
My.Computer.FileSystem.CopyFile(source, destination)

Andrew Morton · Accepted Answer · 2014-09-16T08:59:00.680

Using the code from John Smith at Copying a File To The Clipboard:

Dim f() As String = {"C:\temp\Folder.jpg"}
Dim d As New DataObject(DataFormats.FileDrop, f)
Clipboard.SetDataObject(d, True)

(Tested as working in VS2013 on Windows 7 x64.)

Note that you have to pass an array of strings representing your filename(s), so you could allow the user to gather several items before pasting, if you wanted to.

The true in Clipboard.SetDataObject allows the data to remain on the clipboard when you exit the program, so if the user were to select a file and exit before pasting, they would not have lost their selection.

score 1 · Answer 3 · edited May 04 '15 at 18:37

Found what I was doing wrong.

At first I had tried it with the name of the file in an array, but that gave the same error.

Now I have it like this:

 Dim selectedfile(0) As String

selectedfile(0) = Me.lvFotos.SelectedItems(0).Tag

Dim dataobj As New DataObject

dataobj.SetData(DataFormats.FileDrop, True, selectedfile)

Clipboard.Clear()
Clipboard.SetDataObject(dataobj, True)

The difference is in the line with SETDATA. By setting the second argument to TRUE in SetData and also in the SetDataObject, it started to work.

How do I copy a file to the clipboard and paste it somewhere else?

3 Answers3