Custom Transfer type for drag and drop? (SWT)

[JHuman]

Hi there,
At the moment I'm making an application where I drag an item in a List to a Canvas (all in SWT). However, I don't wish to use TextTransfer or ByteArrayTransf er for the drag and drop data transfer. I want to transfer a class defined by me (lets just call it myCustomObj). I've tried subclassing Transfer but I don't have a clue what to put inside Transfer's methods, particularly isSupportedType () and nativeToJava(). Can anyone help me out (perhaps there's a better way than subclassing Transfer)?

PS: I found an article that kind of looks at what I'm asking here, but that example subclasses ByteArrayTransf er, which I don't think is what I need. I want to transfer an object, not bytes.

[chaarmann]

The sender can serialize(look in wikipedia about serialisation) the object (= convert your object into a ByteArray). Then the receiver can convert the ByteArray back into an object.

You can't send an object (pointer to its memory location) directly over, because that cut-and-paste must work between all different types of programs (basic, c++, java, ...). So what do you think how could a basic-program handle a java object? The internal structure is completely different! So the best way is not to serialize it to a ByteArray, but to XML.