The following sections use an example to illustrate the way in which direct manipulation can be used within a Presentation Manager application or a Workplace Shell object. The example consists of a Customer program which reads and displays customer details. Each customer is displayed as an object in a container window.
The other component of the example is a Telephone program, which accepts customer information from the Customer program via drag/drop, and automatically dials the customer's telephone number. The Telephone program communicates with the Customer program using a private rendering mechanism defined by the application. This rendering mechanism uses shared memory, and is identified by the name DRM_SHAREMEM. The rendering mechanism is explained in detail in Implementing a Private Rendering Mechanism.
The example uses Presentation Manager windows as both the source and target for the drag/drop operation, since this enables a description of the complete set of steps required to complete the operation. For Workplace Shell objects, certain steps are handled automatically by the Workplace Shell itself, and a Workplace Shell object class is therefore not required to carry out these steps. Where a particular step is automated by the Workplace Shell, this is noted in the discussion.