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This article covers working with the pasteboard to provide copy and paste in a Xamarin.Mac application. It shows how to work with standard data types that can be shared between multiple apps and how to support custom data within a given app.

Overview

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When working with C# and .NET in a Xamarin.Mac application, you have access to the same pasteboard (copy and paste) support that a developer working in Objective-C has.

In this article we will be covering the two main ways to use the pasteboard in a Xamarin.Mac app:

Standard Data Types - Since pasteboard operations are typically carried out between two unrelated apps, neither app knows the types of data that the other supports. To maximize the potential for sharing, the pasteboard can hold multiple representations of a given item (using a standard set of common data types), this allow the consuming app to pick the version that is best suited for its needs.
Custom Data - To support the copying and pasting of complex data within your Xamarin.Mac you can define a custom data type that will be handled by the pasteboard. For example, a vector drawing app that allows the user to copy and paste complex shapes that are composed of multiple data types and points.

In this article, we'll cover the basics of working with the pasteboard in a Xamarin.Mac application to support copy and paste operations. It is highly suggested that you work through the Hello, Mac article first, specifically the Introduction to Xcode and Interface Builder and Outlets and Actions sections, as it covers key concepts and techniques that we'll be using in this article.

You may want to take a look at the Exposing C# classes / methods to Objective-C section of the Xamarin.Mac Internals document as well, it explains the Register and Export attributes used to wire up your C# classes to Objective-C objects and UI elements.

Getting started with the pasteboard

The pasteboard presents a standardized mechanism for exchanging data within a given application or between applications. The typical use for a pasteboard in a Xamarin.Mac application is to handle copy and paste operations, however a number of other operations are also supported (such as Drag & Drop and Application Services).

To get you off the ground quickly, we are going to start with a simple, practical introduction to using pasteboards in a Xamarin.Mac app. Later, we'll provide an in-depth explanation of how the pasteboard works and the methods used.

For this example, we will be creating a simple document based application that manages a window containing an image view. The user will be able to copy and paste images between documents in the app and to or from other apps or multiple windows inside the same app.

Creating the Xamarin project

First, we are going to create a new document based Xamarin.Mac app that we will be adding copy and paste support for.

Macos Copy Folder Path

Do the following:

Start Visual Studio for Mac and click the New Project... link.
Select Mac > App > Cocoa App, then click the Next button:
Enter MacCopyPaste for the Project Name and keep everything else as default. Click Next:
Click the Create button:

Add an NSDocument

Next we will add custom NSDocument class that will act as the background storage for the application's user interface. It will contain a single Image View and know how to copy an image from the view into the default pasteboard and how to take an image from the default pasteboard and display it in the Image View.

Right-click on the Xamarin.Mac project in the Solution Pad and select Add > New File..:

Enter ImageDocument for the Name and click the New button. Edit the ImageDocument.cs class and make it look like the following:

Let's take a look at some of the code in detail below.

The following code provides a property to test for the existence of image data on the default pasteboard, if an image is available, true is returned else false:

The following code copies an image from the attached image view into the default pasteboard:

And the following code pastes an image from the default pasteboard and displays it in the attached image view (if the pasteboard contains a valid image):

With this document in place, we'll create the user interface for the Xamarin.Mac app.

Building the user interface

Double-click the Main.storyboard file to open it in Xcode. Next, add a toolbar and an image well and configure them as follows:

Add a copy and paste Image Toolbar Item to the left side of the toolbar. We'll be using those as shortcuts to copy and paste from the Edit menu. Next, add four Image Toolbar Items to the right side of the toolbar. We'll use these to populate the image well with some default images.

For more information on working with toolbars, please see our Toolbars documentation.

Next, let's expose the following outlets and actions for our toolbar items and the image well:

For more information on working with outlets and actions, please see the Outlets and Actions section of our Hello, Mac documentation.

Enabling the user interface

With our user interface created in Xcode and our UI element exposed via outlets and actions, we need to add the code to enable the UI. Double-click the ImageWindow.cs file in the Solution Pad and make it look like the following:

Let's take a look at this code in detail below.

First, we expose an instance of the ImageDocument class that we created above:

By using Export, WillChangeValue and DidChangeValue, we have setup the Document property to allow for Key-Value Coding and Data Binding in Xcode.

We also expose the Image from the image well we added to our UI in Xcode with the following property:

When the Main Window is loaded and displayed, we create an instance of our ImageDocument class and attach the UI's image well to it with the following code:

Finally, in response to the user clicking on the copy and paste toolbar items, we call the instance of the ImageDocument class to do the actual work:

Enabling the File and Edit menus

The last thing we need to do is enable the New menu item from the File menu (to create new instances of our main window) and to enable the Cut, Copy and Paste menu items from the Edit menu.

To enable the New menu item, edit the AppDelegate.cs file and add the following code:

For more information, please see the Working with Multiple Windows section of our Windows documentation.

To enable the Cut, Copy and Paste menu items, edit the AppDelegate.cs file and add the following code:

For each menu item, we get the current, topmost, key window and cast it to our ImageWindow class:

From there we call the ImageDocument class instance of that window to handle the copy and paste actions. For example:

We only want Cut, Copy and Paste menu items to be accessible if there is image data on the default pasteboard or in the image well of the current active window.

Let's add a EditMenuDelegate.cs file to the Xamarin.Mac project and make it look like the following:

Again,

Copy And Paste App For Macos