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Drag and Drop: New Data Transfer Capabilities in the JavaTM 2 Platform, Standard Edition (J2SETM), version 1.4(3) The interface talks about an object called DataFlavor, but what's a flavor? Quite simply, data flavors are ways of representing data. In the Web world, you might have heard the term MIME types, where MIME stands for Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions. MIME types allow you to say that an email attachment is an image or the Web document to deliver through your web server is a text file. Data flavors are just the way of representing MIME types within your programs. MIME types have textual representations like text/html or text/plain. Data flavors on the other hand are classes. Flavors get created by textual representations, but they are classes in the system. They are used by the data transfer mechanism so that when you place something on the clipboard, you can state what type of object it is. Then, when someone gets something off the clipboard, that someone can ask what flavors of data are available. If all the flavors are ones they don't support, they can't get the object off the clipboard. What's this about multiple flavors? You provide data through the data transfer mechanism with multiple flavors so that you can support the widest possible audience. For instance, if you were to copy text within a Word processor, you would want to retain the formatting information. However, if you were to paste the text into something that didn't support the formatting, wouldn't you at least want to be able to get the actual text content? That's how flavors work. You specify that the transferable data can be represented by one or more flavors. You provide the means to check if a particular flavor is supported, and then you provide the mechanism to get the data for a specific flavor. And that is exactly what the Transferable interface does for you.
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