No way of copying system details from ListItem elements

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

Ubuntu Trusty r188
Ubuntu 14.10 r244

1. In System Settings, go to "About this phone".
2. Try to copy the serial number, IMEI, or OS version to the clipboard.

What happens: You can't.

What should happen: You can.

<https://wiki.ubuntu.com/AboutThisDevice#Phone>: "Each value should have the standard UI for copying it as a whole."

This probably depends on a standard toolkit way for software to say "the text in this UI element should be copyable".

The Wi-Fi settings currently works around this by displaying the IP address in a read-only text field, which looks unattractive.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

I've been looking to the toolkit documentation and I didn't find a way to do that, so it indeed looks like a missing toolkit feature

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

Once implemented in the toolkit, it will then still need fixing in ubuntu-system-settings. Most list items shouldn't be copyable, so probably it will be a property that's off by default.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Seems like that would be a bit inconsistent no? If a long press on a menu item give you the option to copy, why shouldn't that be standard and work on all items? User would probably just not try the long press on items they don't want to copy...

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

Similar to context menus on PC, Copy may be a common action for list items, but not necessarily a universal one. For example, this week I saw a design proposal for a list of feeds, using standard list items, where long-tap would open a menu of commands for that feed. "Copy URL" might be a useful function there, but "Copy" by itself probably wouldn't be.

[Zsombor Egri (zsombi)]

Sorry, but this is just an application specific feature. ListItems do not know about the content, only apps do. So apps can use the toolkit provided Clipboard to copy the data into it.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

well, the Listitem could at least provide a standard UI/context menu where to plug a custom handler, it would make easier to implement the copy than having every application implement their menu