How do you allow users to copy and paste from an Xamarin.Forms label

Question

How do you allow users to copy and paste from an Xamarin.Forms Label?

Click on the text on any platform the default settings don\'t allow highlighting and therefore cop

Answer 1

What you could do is wrap your label in a gesture recogniser:

This will trigger your function and in that function you can get to the clipboard and copy and paste. However I haven't been able to find an easy way to access the clipboard in Xamarin.Forms so you have to use the dependency service.

Xamarin.Forms Dependency service documentation

Here is how I did my clipboard data access. Please note that in my project I only needed to nab data from the clipboard so this code just shows you how to access the clipboard data:

1. Create an interface in you X.F project eg:

       public interface IClipBoard
       {
           String GetTextFromClipBoard();
       }
   

2. Implement the interface in your mobile projects:

   Android:
       public string GetTextFromClipBoard ()
       {
           var clipboardmanager = (ClipboardManager)Forms.Context.GetSystemService (Context.ClipboardService);
           var item = clipboardmanager.PrimaryClip.GetItemAt(0);
           var text = item.Text;
           return text;
       }
   
   iOs:
       public string GetTextFromClipBoard ()
       {
           var pb = UIPasteboard.General.GetValue ("public.utf8-plain-text");
           return pb.ToString ();
       }
   

Don't forget to add the Assembly bits at the top:

    iOs: [assembly: Dependency (typeof (ClipBoard_iOs))]
    Android: [assembly: Dependency (typeof (ClipBoard_Droid))]

3. Call the dependency service from you X.F function

       public void YourFunctionToHandleMadTaps(Object sender, EventArgs ea)
       {
           var clipboardText = DependencyService.Get ().GetTextFromClipBoard ();
   
           YourFunctionToHandleMadTaps.Text = clipboardText;
       }