Unable to drag file from nautilus into gnumeric

[Jon Kåre Hellan]

Binary package hint: gnumeric

This may not be well known, but gnumeric supports drag & drop pretty well. One of the things you can do is drag a spreadsheet, text or image file from nautilus or another file manager and drop it into gnumeric. Gnumeric will then open the spreadsheet, import the text file, or insert the image.

However, this doesn't work in Ubuntu Feisty, (gnumeric 1.7.8-0ubuntu1). Nothing happens. If started from a terminal, gnumeric prints the following on the terminal:

  "Received URI file:///home/jk/diskuser.gnumeric with mime type application/octet-stream.
   I have no idea what to do with that."

The problem is that the mime type for the URI isn't recognized. Gnumeric detects mime type by calling the libgoffice function go_get_mime_type (uri_str).

Was libgoffice built with gnome disabled? If so, it always returns application/octet-string, and we get
the observed behaviour in gnumeric.

[Jérôme Guelfucci (jerome-guelfucci-deactivatedaccount)]

Thank you for your bug report. I can confirm this; I will add a libgoffice bug task.

[Julian Robbins (joolsr)]

Still exhibits the same problem in Gutsy.

ie

Received URI file:///home/julianr/network_files/workfiles/D1300-D1399/D1329%20-%20Indra%20A400M%20Planar%20Antennas/Tests/6%20inch%20sinuous/August%202007%200.5-4GHz%20sinuous%20spiral/22-08-07%20sn5579/Linear%20patterns/4GHz%205579_Lin_P1_E.csv with mime type text/csv.
I have no idea what to do with that.

Is this related to the problem, that you cannot assign .csv files to Gnumeric? It doesnt stick when you do this, you have to right click and choode Gnumeric each time.

[Jon Kåre Hellan (hellan)]

No, not related. When you drag a file into gnumeric, gnumeric must figure out the mime type itself. To be able to do so, it has to built with gnome-vs support, which it isn't in Ubuntu.

When you click on a file in the file manager or desktop, it is up to nautilus to figure out the mime type and start the right application.

[Andreas Moog (ampelbein)]

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Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make
Ubuntu better. You reported this bug a while ago and there hasn't been
any activity in it recently. We were wondering is this still an issue
for you? Can you try with latest Ubuntu release? Thanks in advance.

 status incomplete
 subscribe

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[Julian Robbins (joolsr)]

It does seem to work ok now.

Using Ubuntu 8.0.4.1 dragging images, text files, even html opens them in Gnumeric. Dragging an xls file didnt work though, I got an error message Unrecoqnised file format. Oddly, if I try and open a normal .xls file in this std version of gnumeric, I got the same error message, wheras in gnumeric-gtk, it opens fine, AFAIR.

Interesting, if you install gnumeric-gtk (NOT the default option in Ubuntu), then dragging and dropping doesnt work.

[Andreas Moog (ampelbein)]

Closing the report then.