GdkContentFormats

The GdkContentFormats structure is used to advertise and negotiate the format of content.

You will encounter GdkContentFormats when interacting with objects controlling operations that pass data between different widgets, window or application, like GdkDrag, GdkDrop, GdkClipboard or GdkContentProvider.

GDK supports content in 2 forms: GType and mime type. Using GTypes is meant only for in-process content transfers. Mime types are meant to be used for data passing both in-process and out-of-process. The details of how data is passed is described in the documentation of the actual implementations. To transform between the two forms, GdkContentSerializer and GdkContentDeserializer are used.

A GdkContentFormats describes a set of possible formats content can be exchanged in. It is assumed that this set is ordered. GTypes are more important than mime types. Order between different GTypes or mime types is the order they were added in, most important first. Functions that care about order, such as gdk_content_formats_union(), will describe in their documentation how they interpret that order, though in general the order of the first argument is considered the primary order of the result, followed by the order of further arguments.

For debugging purposes, the function gdk_content_formats_to_string() exists. It will print a comma-separated list of formats from most important to least important.

GdkContentFormats is an immutable struct. After creation, you cannot change the types it represents. Instead, new GdkContentFormats have to be created. The GdkContentFormatsBuilder structure is meant to help in this endeavor.