Dock drag & drop

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Tom Owad's picture
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Dock drag & drop

I have a customer whose cannot drag and drop files to any icon on the dock. Drag & drop does work to applications in the finder. It also works in the dock for other users on the same machine. I tried deleting ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.plist, without any change. Any ideas as to what other files might be causing the problem?

coius's picture
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permissions

it sounds like the permissions for the dock are screwed up

doug-doug the mighty's picture
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maybe something simple...

...I had a similar problem. I was new to OS X at the time and missed that the file must be dropped on the right side of the veritcal seperator and cannot just be dropped any where.

Is it possible your user has made the same faux pas? Conversly, applications cannot be dropped on the right side, only on the left.

Took me a while to figure this out, but I was still new to X at the time.

Otherwise, it may well be permissions, but I cannot begin to speculate what, especially if the problem is happening for all users. You may have to purge the dock prefs file from with the root user.

HTH

Tom Owad's picture
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Re: maybe something simple...

...I had a similar problem. I was new to OS X at the time and missed that the file must be dropped on the right side of the veritcal seperator and cannot just be dropped any where.

Is it possible your user has made the same faux pas? Conversly, applications cannot be dropped on the right side, only on the left.

No. The problem is with dropping documents _onto_ application icons, to open the documents.

Otherwise, it may well be permissions, but I cannot begin to speculate what, especially if the problem is happening for all users. You may have to purge the dock prefs file from with the root user.

The problem is limited to one user account.

Tom Owad's picture
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Solution

The problem turned out to be with a cache file in /Library/Caches.

At first, I tried deleting the com.apple.dock.iconcache* files in this directory (the only files that appeared dock-related), but this had no effect. In response to this affront to sound logic, I deleted every file and subdirectory in /Library/Caches. This solved the problem.

I'm disappointed to learn there are user-specific cache files stored outside the user's home directory.

Tom Owad's picture
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Sorry

I inadvertantly deleted an entire thread in this node. My apologies to BDub, chris501, and the other poster who reported having similair problems - please be sure to let us know if this fix works for you.

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re: Solution

Trashing the contents of the root/Library/Cache folder did indeed bring back drag and drop capability to the dock.

Thanks very much for the tip!

Tom Owad's picture
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Glad to hear it

Next person to have this problem - before you delete your /Library/Cache files, could you email me an archive of them? I'd like to spend some time trying to figure out exactly what's causing the problem.

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