I'm trying to drag data from the Winforms portion of my application on a WPF controls that's contained inside an "ElementHost". And it crashes when I try doing so.
Trying the same thing but from Winforms to Winforms works fine. (See example code below)
I need help on making this work… have any clues what I'm doing wrong?
Thanks!
Example:
In the sample code below, I'm just trying to drag a custom MyContainerClass object created when initating the drag on the label control on a 1) System.Windows.Forms.TextBox (Winforms) and 2) System.Windows.TextBox (WPF, added to an ElementHost).
Case 1) works fine but case 2) is crashing when trying to retrieve the drop data using GetData(). GetDataPresent("WindowsFormsApplication1.MyContainerClass") returns "true" so In theory, I should be able to retrive my drop data of that type like in Winforms.
Here is the stack trace of the crash:
"Error HRESULT E_FAIL has been returned from a call to a COM component" with the following stack trace: at System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal.ThrowExceptionForHRInternal(Int32 errorCode, IntPtr errorInfo) at System.Windows.Forms.DataObject.GetDataIntoOleStructs(FORMATETC& formatetc, STGMEDIUM& medium) at System.Windows.Forms.DataObject.System.Runtime.InteropServices.ComTypes.IDataObject.GetDataHere(FORMATETC& formatetc, STGMEDIUM& medium) at System.Windows.Forms.DataObject.System.Runtime.InteropServices.ComTypes.IDataObject.GetData(FORMATETC& formatetc, STGMEDIUM& medium) at System.Windows.DataObject.OleConverter.GetDataInner(FORMATETC& formatetc, STGMEDIUM& medium) at System.Windows.DataObject.OleConverter.GetDataFromOleHGLOBAL(String format, DVASPECT aspect, Int32 index) at System.Windows.DataObject.OleConverter.GetDataFromBoundOleDataObject(String format, DVASPECT aspect, Int32 index) at System.Windows.DataObject.OleConverter.GetData(String format, Boolean autoConvert, DVASPECT aspect, Int32 index) at System.Windows.DataObject.OleConverter.GetData(String format, Boolean autoConvert) at System.Windows.DataObject.GetData(String format, Boolean autoConvert) at System.Windows.DataObject.GetData(String format) at WindowsFormsApplication1.Form1.textBox_PreviewDragEnter(Object sender, DragEventArgs e) in WindowsFormsApplication1\WindowsFormsApplication1\Form1.cs:line 48
Here is some code:
// -- Add an ElementHost to your form --
// -- Add a label to your form --
public partial class Form1 : Form
{
public Form1()
{
InitializeComponent();
System.Windows.Controls.TextBox textBox = new System.Windows.Controls.TextBox();
textBox.Text = "WPF TextBox";
textBox.AllowDrop = true;
elementHost2.Child = textBox;
textBox.PreviewDragEnter += new System.Windows.DragEventHandler(textBox_PreviewDragEnter);
System.Windows.Forms.TextBox wfTextBox = new System.Windows.Forms.TextBox();
wfTextBox.Text = "Winforms TextBox";
wfTextBox.AllowDrop = true;
wfTextBox.DragEnter += new DragEventHandler(wfTextBox_DragEnter);
Controls.Add(wfTextBox);
}
void wfTextBox_DragEnter(object sender, DragEventArgs e)
{
bool dataPresent = e.Data.GetDataPresent("WindowsFormsApplication1.MyContainerClass");
// NO CRASH here!
object data = e.Data.GetData("WindowsFormsApplication1.MyContainerClass");
}
void textBox_PreviewDragEnter(object sender, System.Windows.DragEventArgs e)
{
bool dataPresent = e.Data.GetDataPresent("WindowsFormsApplication1.MyContainerClass");
// Crash appens here!!
// {"Error HRESULT E_FAIL has been returned from a call to a COM component."}
object data = e.Data.GetData("WindowsFormsApplication1.MyContainerClass");
}
private void label1_MouseDown(object sender, MouseEventArgs e)
{
label1.DoDragDrop(new MyContainerClass(label1.Text), DragDropEffects.Copy);
}
}
public class MyContainerClass
{
public object Data { get; set; }
public MyContainerClass(object data)
{
Data = data;
}
}
Best Answer
@Pedery & jmayor: Thanks for the suggestions guys! (see my findings below)
After quite a few experimentation, trials and errors, and a bit of "Reflector'ing", I managed to figure out exactly why I was receiving the cryptic error message "Error HRESULT E_FAIL has been returned from a call to a COM component".
It was due to the fact that when dragging data WPF <-> Winforms in a same app, that data has to be Serializable!
I've checked how difficult it would be to transform all of our classes to "Serializable" and I would have a been a real pain for a couple of reasons... one, we would need to practically make all of classes serializable and two, some of these classes have references to Controls! And Controls aren't serializable. So a major refactoring would have been needed.
So... since we wanted to pass any object of any class to drag from/to WPF inside the same application, I decided to create a wrapper class, with the Serializable attribute and implementing ISerializable. I would have 1 contructor with 1 parameter of type "object" which would be the actual drag data. That wrapper, when serializing/de-serializing, would serialize not the object itself... but rather the IntPtr to the object (which we can do since we only want that functionnality inside our 1 instance only application.) See code sample below:
To keep the IDataObject functionnality, I created the following DataObject wrapper:
And we are using the above classes like this:
I know I know... it's not very pretty... but it's doing what we wanted. We also created a dragdrop helper class which masks the DataObject creation and has templated GetData functions to retrieve the data without any cast... a bit like:
So thanks again for the replies! You guys gave me good ideas where to look at for possible solutions!
-Oli