I don't know what the Lotus internal clipboard formats are either

Raymond Chen

Apparently some people think my psychic powers extend to being able to steal trade secrets by sheer force of concentration.

I’ve been trying to write an application which allows to drag and drop documents from lotus notes. If I just drag and drop a document from lotus notes to Windows explorer, it creates a .shb file (regular windows document link file). Therefore I think it is possible to simulate this in a custom application as well.

BTW: I found that lotus notes uses following list of clipboard formats for OLE drag drop.
Notes Private Data
Notes Private Link
Link Source Descriptor
Link Source

I also think only the last two formats will be enough for the task I want to accomplish. In fact they are more likely to be windows OLE clipboard formats. However, these clipboard formats are not documented.

I would be grateful if you could send me the definitions of data structures I could use to access data from these CFs.

(Here’s another example.) I’m not sure why somebody who works for Microsoft is expected to be able to produce documentation on a Lotus Notes data structure. When you drag a COM object into an Explorer window on Windows XP, the resulting scrap file doesn’t understand the object you dropped. It just makes a copy of it. When you drag the scrap and drop it back into a document, the scrap merely spits back the data it was cloned from. But it doesn’t know what that data means. If you stick a piece of paper in a photocopier, it will produce a copy of the original document. But there’s no point asking the manufacturer of the copier, “I put this document written in French into your copier, and it made a copy. Can you tell me what it says? Obviously, you understand French because you were able to copy the document.”

Reading the question again, perhaps the person is asking for documentation on Link Source Descriptor and Link Source. Don’t be helpless. I don’t know what they do either, but a little searching turns up OBJECTDESCRIPTOR for the link source descriptor. Link source is a little trickier, but from this page it appears to be a serialized moniker. I have never worked with OLE embeddings; I don’t know any more than the next guy. Why don’t you go read about it and write a blog entry summarizing what you’ve learned?

Raymond Chen

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