1118321 - Please provide a documentation page for nsITransferable

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Developer Documentation Graveyard :: Mozilla Platform, defect, P5)

Description

[Naja Melan]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:31.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/31.0
Build ID: 20100101

Steps to reproduce:

nsITransferable is a class that is needed amongst other things to read from the clipboard. It is quite common and has parculiarities such as the obligation to call it's init method. It would be nice if there was a documentation page for it to explain such things.

Comment 1

[Eric Shepherd [:sheppy]]

XPCOM documentation is, unfortunately, not a very high priority at this time for the staff writing team, so our policy generally is to summarize what needs to be done and suggest that a volunteer try to take lead on the writing work.

That said, I have at least created this page (which needs both editorial and technical reviews, and probably some fleshing-out of the text):

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Tech/XPCOM/Reference/Interface/nsITransferable

Reference pages that still need to be created:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Tech/XPCOM/Reference/Interface/nsIFlavorDataProvider
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Tech/XPCOM/Reference/Interface/nsIFormatConverter (and any interfaces that are related to that, if applicable)
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Tech/XPCOM/Reference/Interface/nsISupportsPrimitives

In addition, the documentation for using the clipboard should be reviewed to ensure it's correct and up to date. This includes (but is not limited to):

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Tech/XPCOM/Using_the_clipboard

As well as all the drag & drop content (which needs an overhaul in general).

Comment 2

[Naja Melan]

Thanks for creating those pages. It gives an idea of the different methods and attributes on there. If I remember well it's not possible to use nsiTransferable without calling it's init function, so if an introduction is written it might be good to mention that.

I'm quite new to developing on the mozilla platform, but what I don't understand is that people who develop API's don't immediately write the corresponding documentation for it. It seems they are in the best position to understand the ins and outs of what they just wrote.

Comment 3

[BMO Automation]

MDN Web Docs' bug reporting has now moved to GitHub. From now on, please file content bugs at https://github.com/mdn/sprints/issues/ and platform bugs at https://github.com/mdn/kuma/issues/.