Rich Text Depression Hits
This post was going to be an angry vent at the way Domino deals with rich-text and, specifically, with attachments in the browser. But, I am just too wound-up even to be able to think straight and write down anything that makes sense. Tomorrow I will try and explain why it is that I've spent the whole of the day messing about and still don't have a solution.
If only I could bill Lotus for all the days I've spent banging my head against the wall screaming "WHY, WHY, WHY!?", maybe I would be a little happier. I know I have a reputation for continually slating Domino. This is exactly the reason why. If it were nice to me I would be nice to it.
Karen comes home from work sometimes complaining of having had a bad day. Understandable for a teacher who deals with teenagers all day long. She normally asks how my day's been and I normally say it was okay, refraining from telling her about the bad ones. For me, the bad days are just like today. What have I got to show for it? Nothing! Karen knows little about what I do so it would be hard to explain why I was so pent up:
"Well, you see honey. I work with this product called Domino."
"Domino! What, like the game?"
"Yeah, but not as much fun."
"Ah, ok."
"And it's got this feature called Rich Text"
"What's rich about text?"
I tend to suffer in silence instead...
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Rich text...arrggghhh!!!!!!
I remember a few years ago now working on a Knowledge Base (for IBM, no less!) and the big hassle for us developers was the fact the actual content was stored in one RT field.
It was a multi-db app and the original developer decided to do all the linking using replica-ids instead of dbname. So inside all the content (13000 documents!) all the links to other docs were done on docid/replicaid, which made life very interesting when we had to make a new version of the knowledge base for a new version of the application that it was supporting.
In the end we bought a third party plugin (can't remember the name of it) to allow us to do some kind of automation with the rt field, e.g. creating a link to an entry in the Glossary database, but of course we couldn't put the newly created link in the current position of the cursor, it had to go in the top and the content developer had to cut and paste the link where they wanted it.
So any banging of heads against the wall about rich text fields, just know that you're not the only one to have gone there. :)
Rich text is ok. As long as you don't use it. ;-)
The best way to deal with Rich Text in the browser is use Alan Hurt's DHTML Editor. Admittedly t is IE only but it controls Rich Text, images and attachments in one easy to use utility. See {Link}
Tom - There's also HTMLArea, which takes an existing textarea and makes it a full HTML Editor. Their latest Betas are also supporting Mozilla. I haven't actually had the opportunity to use it with a Domino app yet, but I see no reason why it won't work.
{Link}
I've been using this editor {Link} that is fairly easy to implement and customise.
The trouble is not with the editor. The trouble is having a web interface that will let you edit RichText that will maintain editibilility in the Notes client. It all goes wrong as soon as you add an attachment.
Whereas we have the $V2AttachmentOptions field, there's no equivalent (probably there is but we aren't told!) to hide MIME attachments from displaying in those ugly tables at the bottom of the Rich Text fields.
What I've cooked up is the ugliest of hacks. Multiple hidden applets and onload events and all sorts. More on that tomorrow.....
Now, there's a coincidence Marcin ;-) We must have been writing them at the same time.
I've used the beta and it has issues. Better to stick with v2. It works with Domino but there are caveats that I'll discuss more over the next few days..