Keyboard nav uses non-public properties in paste

[rachel-fenichel]

Category

• Plugins

Component

keyboard-navigation

Describe the bug

The paste function directly accesses Blockly.clipboardXml_, Blockly.clipboardSource_, and Blockly.clipboardTypeCounts_.

These were always supposed to be private, and will disappear in the next Blockly release because of the changes in google/blockly#5237

To Fix

• Call Blockly.getClipboardInfo to get an object containing the xml, source, and type counts.
• Release after the next Blockly release.

[rachel-fenichel]

@BeksOmega pointed out that a better solution would be to restructure paste to not access the clipboard contents directly. It could instead call Blockly.paste or similar.

[BeksOmega]

I think the best thing to do here is probably to modify paste in core to return the block if pasting worked (instead of true). Then we would be able to easily insert the pasted block where desired.

Sadly changing the return type of paste would be a breaking change (but I don't think many people would be affected).

Otherwise. we could create public accessors, but long-term I don't think this is a great idea. Firstly, it increases the size of Blockly's API, which is ehhhh. And secondly, it means we'll have to keep maintaining and updating keyboard nav's paste as the paste in core changes.