Moved the discussion from viewtopic.php?f=220&t=122820.

Here's a quote:

petermueller wrote:Of course some standardized label reports would reduce the efforts for some standard work. Report handling was quite OK - but a duplicate Button for the fields would be nice. I don't like to Adjust the size for every selection.

@Peter @Adam
Thanks for reporting the wish: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=339032 (everyone else please follow comments posted there first)

The truth is somewhere in between I feel. First, people aware of technology behind Kexi (Qt, KDE frameworks) know the clipboard handling routines are cross-platform, implemented independently from the OS differences.
Then, @Peter: clipboard is handled with the help of mime types, so when you copy a non-plain text object, it is of specific type like kexi/form or kexi/report, so encoding and decoding fully belongs to Kexi.

So don't be afraid, this is handled, using copy-paste is technically not a workaround. If and when duplication is implemented, it definitely will call the code from of copy/paste.

Then, different operating systems have different tradition of working with duplicates. Copy-paste is approach on one app, duplicate in another. I don't see a pattern other than tradition. In LibreOffice, Draw and Impress offer Edit->Duplicate command, which shows entire dialog for "mass duplication". See http://wstaw.org/m/2014/09/13/plasma-desktopW11843.png. Is this what you'd call most needed?
LibreOffice Calc, Base lacks it. It's advanced but may be useful. Please note that auto-creation of report elements/form widgets by dragging field names from a data source pane shall be equally useful (except for formatting, but it could be defined at high level in styling instead).

Simple 1x duplication is missing in entire LibreOffice and (I think) in MS Office, including MS Access.

What is provided instead in MS apps since maybe Office 95 (all apps, not just Access) and in LibreOffice, is Ctrl+mouse drag. It's supported in Kexi forms (just visualization of dragging is missing since Kexi 2.x),

Anyway, we have no manpower for complex solutions, so simple duplication has the highest probability in Kexi 2.9 or so.

Then, on the other hand, we'd like to avoid bloat in the GUI, especially the context menus and menus. But a shortcut... do you think it would be useful in addition to Ctrl+Drag? What shortcut would you propose? And what's the tradition on Mac?

Finally, I am amazed by the fact that @Peter is accustomed with so wide list of database app creation software. If I understand it properly, we definitely would like to hear more advices from you!

By the way, added a junior job description for the task: #17 at https://community.kde.org/Kexi/Junior_J ... provements