Common Desktop Environment: Style Guide and Certification Checklist

Placement Upon Drop

From the user's point of view, the placement of the dropped item is dependent on the task the user is doing and the application or context the task is in.

In File Manager, if the default is set to As Placed, then icons are placed where they are dropped. If the default is set to Sorted Grid, then a dropped icon is automatically sorted and then placed, which means it may not be placed where the user drops it.

In some cases, where the dropped item gets placed is not a criteria. For example, Front Panel controls require only that the dragged item be over the control to activate the drop zone.

In the Compose window in Mailer, the placement depends on what is being dropped. If the user is dragging a piece of text, then the text is inserted at the drop point. From user testing, this is what users expect. If the user drops an icon, a file, or a buffer, then the contents are included at the insertion point. This mirrors the behavior the user gets when the user selects a file from the Include File Selection Box.

You should determine appropriate behavior for your application based on what type of tasks the user is doing.

Required

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If a collection does not have a fixed insertion point or keep elements ordered in a specific way, the insertion position for transferred data is determined as follows:

For BTransfer-based (or BSelect) primary and drag transfer operations, excepted as noted below for text collections, the insertion position is the position at which the user releases BTransfer (or BSelect).
In a text-like collection, when the user drops selected text, the insertion position is the position at which the user releases BTransfer (or Bselect). When the user drops an icon, the insertion position is the text cursor and the data is pasted before it.
In a list-like collection, the insertion position for other transfer operations is the element with the location cursor, and the data is pasted before it.
The insertion position is the position in the destination where transferred data is placed. Some mouse-based transfer operations place data at the pointer position if possible. Other operations, including keyboard-based transfer, generally place the data at the location cursor.