State of the art in Copy to Clipboard feature (My investigations)

Flash alternative

• I have found the following alternatives:
  • Zclip: we are using
  • zeroclipboard (ancestor, zclip uses its button flash movie): only text
  • Clippy: only text in the page https://github.com/mojombo/clippy
• You can see in the (ActionScript:Flash) code: http://code.google.com/p/zeroclipboard/source/browse/trunk/ZeroClipboard.as (line 77)
• They use System.setClipboard(cliptText) call, which only supports plain text strings, as we can see in Adobe AIR API refference: http://help.adobe.com/en_US/air/reference/html/flash/system/System.html
• So we cant pass formatted text through flash.

HTML5 alternative

There is an API in draft to standardize clipboard events, but is not implemented in any browser for the moment http://dev.w3.org/2006/webapi/clipops/

My Rails/Zclip implementation

I'm using zclip (based on zeroclipboard) to copy text from a restfule service to the system clipboard:

$('.copy-to-clipboard').zclip
  path:'/ZeroClipboard.swf'
  setHandCursor: true
  copy: -> 
    ajaxReturn = $.ajax
     type: 'GET'
     async: false
     url: '/resources/copy_to_clipboard/' + $(this).attr("class").match(/[0-9]+/)
    return ajaxReturn.responseText

It's coffeescript.

If the service (/resources/copy_to_clipboard/) serves text it's copied right. But if it servers a DOCX file, it doesn't copy right to the clipboard. Take a look at the rails controller:

  def copy_to_clipboard
    send_file @resource.resource_content.content.file.file, :type =&