The following figure shows the typical interactions between an ABL application and other graphical applications using the clipboard.

The dotted box emphasizes that, from the user's viewpoint, the clipboard is essentially invisible.

ABL supports clipboard interactions with other graphical applications in the Windows environments. In character mode, ABL supports clipboard interactions between fields in a single OpenEdge application. Using the CLIPBOARD system handle and an appropriate set of user-interface triggers, you can define the response of your OpenEdge application to the standard clipboard operations on your system. For example, you can eliminate cut operations (that remove data) and provide only copy and paste; or you can specify how the data is transferred, whether all or part of it is transferred, and where it goes when it is pasted into your OpenEdge application.