Formatted Text / Rich Text Editor

Rationale

This components wraps the TinyMCE rich text editor.

Usage

Include the TinyMCE editor in your page with:

<fr:tinymce ref="..."/>

Since Orbeon Forms 2016.1, it is also enabled with:

<xf:textarea mediatype="text/html">

Until Orbeon Forms 4.10 included, <xf:textarea mediatype="text/html"> was using the deprecated YUI 2 RTE editor.

Configuration

Attribute, form, and property configuration

[SINCE Orbeon Forms 2023.1.1]

The component can be configured using the config attribute, which accepts a JSON configuration string. If the config attribute is not set, the value of the oxf.xforms.xbl.fr.tinymce.config property is used instead. The default value for this property is defined in the properties-xforms.xml file, located inside WEB-INF/lib/orbeon-core.jar. Attributes and properties are interpreted as AVTs (as with all attributes and properties that configure components), which means you should use double brackets {{...}} in the JSON, since single brackets are interpreted as the start and end of an expression.

<property as="xs:string"  name="oxf.xforms.xbl.fr.tinymce.config">
    {{
        "inline"               : true,
        "hidden_input"         : false,
        "language"             : "en",
        "statusbar"            : false,
        "menubar"              : false,
        "plugins"              : "lists link",
        "toolbar"              : "bold italic | bullist numlist outdent indent | link",
        "browser_spellcheck"   : true,
        "encoding"             : "xml",
        "entity_encoding"      : "raw",
        "forced_root_block"    : "div",
        "visual_table_class"   : "fr-tinymce-table",
        "skin"                 : false,
        "convert_urls"         : false,
        "sandbox_iframes"      : true,
        "convert_unsafe_embeds": true
    }}
</property>

For backward compatibility, if an TINYMCE_CUSTOM_CONFIG JavaScript variable (see below) is found in the page, it is used as the configuration.

Deprecated configuration

[DEPRECATED SINCE Orbeon Forms 2023.1.1]

Prefer the oxf.xforms.xbl.fr.tinymce.config property above.

You can also customize the TinyMCE editor by adding JavaScript code to your form that defines a TinyMCE configuration and assign it to the global TINYMCE_CUSTOM_CONFIG variable.

If you don't set this variable, the component uses a built-in default configuration. The default configuration limits the number of buttons shown to users.

Read-only and relevant MIPs

The component supports being bound to a node which can be read-only or non-relevant, as defined by an <xf:bind>, and those properties can change dynamically, after the form is loaded. When bound to a read-only node, the toolbar and status bar are hidden, and the text can't be edited. When the bound node is non-relevant, the whole TinyMCE is hidden.

Update heuristic

Update of the bound node with the text typed by users — As users types in the editor, the TinyMCE generates change events, upon which the latest text is stored in the bound node. This happens when the editor loses the focus, but also at other key points while editing, for instance when changing formatting, or starting a new paragraph.
Update of the editor with a new value stored in the bound node — Whenever the value of the bound node is changed, for instance with an <xf:setvalue>, the content of the editor is update accordingly, unless the editor has the focus. This prevents the cursor moving back to the top of the editor in the middle of users entering text, for instance if you have XForms code that updates the HTML to perform cleanup.

Limitations

Because of the update heuristic (see above), by design the TinyMCE won't update if the value of the bound node changes while the focus is on the TinyMCE.