This is a small blogpost on how to implement drag and drop functionality in an AIR-application. It can be used to make an application much more easier to work with.

At first, you have to add two event listeners to the component, NATIVE_DRAG_ENTER and NATIVE_DRAG_DROP. Both of them are NativeDragEvents.

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addEventListener(NativeDragEvents. NATIVE_DRAG_ENTER, nativedragenterHandler);
addEventListener(NativeDragEvents. NATIVE_DRAG_DROP, nativedragdropHandler);

The nativedragenterHandler will be triggered whenever a user hovers the component with one or more files selected. The nativedragdropHandler will be triggered when the user ‘drops’ his files on this component.

Put this code in the nativedragenterHandler, to let the component accept a user to drop his files here.

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DragManager.acceptDragDrop(this);

Everything else happens in the nativedragdropHandler. The code below shows you how to fetch the dropped files, so you can work with them in the application.

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var droppedFiles:Array = event.clipboard.getData(ClipboardFormats.FILE_LIST_FORMAT) as Array;