Dragging and dropping data into Nodezator

[KennedyRichard]

There are some well-established GUI actions that Nodezator is still lacking. Among them is the ability to receive data dragged from outside the app into the app.

The possibilities are actually many, depending on where in the app the data is dropped and what kind of data it is:

• when dropping one or more files into the canvas, the app could automatically instantiate a data node with a preview widget for that kind of file(s); for instance, if we drop one or more images, a data node with an image preview widget would be instantiated;
• if instead of the canvas, the files are dropped in a preview widget itself, the preview widget values are updated to reference the files dropped, so that files would be displayed instead; for instance, say you have a font preview widget in the canvas and you want to change the font displayed, you can just drag a font from a file manager in your own system and drop it on top of the widget and it would update immediately;
• when dropping selected text in the canvas, we would cast the text into the most sensible type possible and instantiate a data node with a widget suitable for that type; for instance, if the text is "34", then it is cast as a number and a data node is instantiated with an int/float widget;
• when the selected text is dropped into a widget instead, the widget will try to cast the text into a type appropriate for it, or display a dialogue if it is not able to; for instance, if you drop "(255, 255, 0)" or "yellow" over a color button widget, it will convert the string into the corresponding color value and use it;
• when dropping text on the text editor it would be inserted where the text cursor is sitting;

There's probably many more possibilities, but those are the ones I could come up with.

I don't know when I'll be able to implement this, given the amount of work to be done for other features, but this is actually simple to implement because pygame API for "drop" events is straightforward and provides all the data needed. In fact, this is one of the features that I might not even schedule, just implement right away as soon as I get the opportunity.

Peace