QMainWindow drag and drop in Qt 5.11.1

[d_stranz]

I have also tested and confirmed that this does not work under Qt 5.14.2, Windows MSVC 2015 64-bit. I haven't really found anything online that addresses this - dragging from outside the program onto the main window - so any advice on what might be causing the problem would be appreciated.

[d_stranz]

OK, I have found the reason in this stackoverflow post.

It has nothing to do with Qt and everything to do with Microsoft Windoze stupidity. I start Visual Studio in one of two ways:

1 - For projects that I am working on all the time, I make a Windows BAT file with a shortcut on my desktop that starts VS and loads the solution.

2 - For new projects or ones I work on infrequently, I double-click the Visual Studio desktop icon, which opens VS with no solution loaded, the create or load the project from the VS menu.

In case 1, generally the BAT file starts up VS with ordinary user permissions. I have a program there where drag and drop works completely fine. In case 2, I had the VS shortcut set to "Run as Administrator" because sometimes I have code that needs to write to protected areas or needs Admin permission. It was easier to set Admin permission on the icon and forget it than to have to shut down a project and restart it because you forgot it needed special permissions. That what I used to create the program I posted above, where D&D doesn't work, and that's how I have started it each time for the last two days while I have been trying to figure this out.

So after reading the stackoverflow post, I changed the startup to run as a normal user and loaded the program. And no surprise, my little test program works just fine.

For those of you who might come across this post years from now, wondering why D&D works sometimes but not others even on the same program, here's the answer:

Windows security will not let you drag from an application running with user-level security (like Windows file explorer) and drop onto one that is running at a higher level of security. And if you start Visual Studio (or Qt Creator) with Admin security, then any program you start from inside those IDEs inherits that security and won't allow drag and drop from programs with lower security.

So thank you Microsoft for wasting two entire days of my life.