How to listen for a copy in Android

Question

To get myself a little more familiar with content providers in Android, I\'m making a small clipboard manager app. Its core functionality is to simply add whatever you copy

Answer 1

Put inside your class:

ClipboardManager.OnPrimaryClipChangedListener mPrimaryChangeListener = new ClipboardManager.OnPrimaryClipChangedListener() {
        public void onPrimaryClipChanged() {

            // this will be called whenever you copy something to the clipboard
        }
    };

Put this inside onCreate method:

ClipboardManager clipboard = (ClipboardManager) this.getSystemService(Context.CLIPBOARD_SERVICE);
clipboard.addPrimaryClipChangedListener(mPrimaryChangeListener);

That's all. I hope I helped you.

Answer 2

If you are using API level 11 (3.0) or above, then you can use addPrimaryClipChangedListener which is documented here and there is some example usage here.

Answer 3

What API do you have? This answer: Listener for clipboard content change? seems to suggest that there is a way for android 3.0 and higher, but not lower, unfortunately.

The only other thing I can think of is making a service, querying the clipboard every so often to see if it has changed or has new text. This can be easily done using ClipBoardManager.