Why can't I cast a buffered image into a transferrable object to send it to the clipboard?

Question

I'm trying to save a bufferedImage to my system's clipboard, basically my program makes a screencapture of an area and saves it as a PNG, but now I'd like it to be able to send that image to the clipboard too,

I've tried with Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().getSystemClipboard().setContents( (Transferable) myImage, null);

Eclipse wants me to cast my buffered myImage image into a transferable, yet it's not allowed, and the code I've looked at on stackOverflow on the matter is about as long as my whole program, I failed to use it properly, so I'm not sure what a transferable is and how could I make one from my Buffered Image, would someone explain?

Answer 1

You can't cast a BufferedImage to a Transferable (as they are distinct types).

However, you can easily wrap your image in a Transferable like this:

Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit()
        .getSystemClipboard()
        .setContents(new ImageTransferable(myImage), null);

static final class ImageTransferable {
    final BufferedImage image;

    public ImageTransferable(final BufferedImage image) {
        this.image = image;
    }

    @Override
    public DataFlavor[] getTransferDataFlavors() {
        return new DataFlavor[] {DataFlavor.imageFlavor};
    }

    @Override
    public boolean isDataFlavorSupported(final DataFlavor flavor) {
        return DataFlavor.imageFlavor.equals(flavor);
    }

    @Override
    public Object getTransferData(final DataFlavor flavor) throws UnsupportedFlavorException, IOException {
        if (isDataFlavorSupported(flavor)) {
            return image;
        }

        throw new UnsupportedFlavorException(flavor);
    }
};