ACC: How to Retrieve Information from the Clipboard (95/97) (138910)

SUMMARY

Advanced: Requires expert coding, interoperability, and multiuser skills.

Microsoft Access does not have a command to retrieve information from the Clipboard. To retrieve information from the Clipboard, you need to define a Visual Basic for Applications function that calls several Windows API functions. This article defines a function that retrieves text from the Clipboard.

This article assumes that you are familiar with Visual Basic for Applications and with creating Microsoft Access applications using the programming tools provided with Microsoft Access. For more information about Visual Basic for Applications, please refer to your version of the "Building Applications with Microsoft Access" manual.

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To retrieve information from the Clipboard, follow these steps.

NOTE: You may have some Microsoft Windows API functions defined in an existing Microsoft Access library; therefore, your declarations may be duplicates. If you receive a duplicate procedure name error message, remove or comment out the declarations statement in your code.

Create a module and type the following lines in the Declarations section:

      Declare Function OpenClipboard Lib "User32" (ByVal hwnd As Long) _
         As Long
      Declare Function CloseClipboard Lib "User32" () As Long
      Declare Function GetClipboardData Lib "User32" (ByVal wFormat As _
         Long) As Long
      Declare Function GlobalAlloc Lib "kernel32" (ByVal wFlags&, ByVal _
         dwBytes As Long) As Long
      Declare Function GlobalLock Lib "kernel32" (ByVal hMem As Long) _
         As Long
      Declare Function GlobalUnlock Lib "kernel32" (ByVal hMem As Long) _
         As Long
      Declare Function GlobalSize Lib "kernel32" (ByVal hMem As Long) _
         As Long
      Declare Function lstrcpy Lib "kernel32" (ByVal lpString1 As Any, _
         ByVal lpString2 As Any) As Long

      Public Const GHND = &H42
      Public Const CF_TEXT = 1
      Public Const MAXSIZE = 4096

Type the following procedure:

       Function ClipBoard_GetData()
         Dim hClipMemory As Long
         Dim lpClipMemory As Long
         Dim MyString As String
         Dim RetVal As Long

         If OpenClipboard(0&) = 0 Then
            MsgBox "Cannot open Clipboard. Another app. may have it open"
            Exit Function
         End If

         ' Obtain the handle to the global memory
         ' block that is referencing the text.
         hClipMemory = GetClipboardData(CF_TEXT)
         If IsNull(hClipMemory) Then
            MsgBox "Could not allocate memory"
            GoTo OutOfHere
         End If

         ' Lock Clipboard memory so we can reference
         ' the actual data string.
         lpClipMemory = GlobalLock(hClipMemory)

         If Not IsNull(lpClipMemory) Then
            MyString = Space$(MAXSIZE)
            RetVal = lstrcpy(MyString, lpClipMemory)
            RetVal = GlobalUnlock(hClipMemory)

            ' Peel off the null terminating character.
            MyString = Mid(MyString, 1, InStr(1, MyString, Chr$(0), 0) - 1)
         Else
            MsgBox "Could not lock memory to copy string from."
         End If

      OutOfHere:

         RetVal = CloseClipboard()
         ClipBoard_GetData = MyString

      End Function

To test this function, copy one of the lines from the function to the Clipboard, type the following line in the Debug window, and then press ENTER.
?ClipBoard_GetData()
Note that the line you copied is displayed in the Debug window.

ACC: How to Retrieve Information from the Clipboard (95/97) (138910)

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