Fly together Forever

Finally I think it’s time for a public review of the work I have done for the extensible Editor2/Editor2Toolbar task. The patch can be viewed/downloaded in the trac page. A live online demo is also available.

The changelog against last weekly report includes:

• Implemented blockformat select (also fixed bug #1042)
• The toolbar items which are not available (disabled) are made obvious (greyed via css style)
• Fixed to work in IE none-activeX mode
• Other minor bug fixes

In FF, it works as good as the original implementation. However, in IE, it does have several issues and I’d like to hear other developer opinions/feedbacks.

In activeX mode, the htmltoggle functionality is not working properly when the editor is focused: when toggle back to WYSIWYG mode, the content is not visible (see also the FIXME in the patch). I tried several workarounds, but to no avail. Another issue is that the activeX editor does not provide support for command inserthorizentalrule and strikethrough and I can not come up with a decend replacement.

In none-activeX mode, the editor in IE has a more serious issue: undo/redo is completely unavailable! I do not know what it used to be like, but it seems to me that there is no way around except implementing redo/undo stack in javascript, which is not such a easy task (FCKeditor does do this for IE as it does not use activeX object for editors).

In order to meet the requirements for the Editor, undo/redo is compulsory, so that leaves us two options:

1. do not support none-activeX mode at all for IE
2. or implement our own undo/redo stack (as FCKeditor does).

However, the second option is one of the things that the original design intended to avoid, IIRC.

In addition, with the current patch, no matter which toolbar you use (in IE, two toolbars are shown), the (last) focused editor in the page actually executes the command the button triggers. This provides the possibility of more complex toolbar sharing: The current toolbar sharing is only able to share the first instance in the page, while with this patch, it is easy to add support to define toolbar groups: you can have 4 instance in the page, and specify the first two share the same toolbar while the last two share another one. I don’t know how useful this would sound to people. If no one is interested in this possibility, I won’t bother to implement it.

I’d also like to hear opinions/feedback about the approach this patch took.

This patch is only meant for a technique preview, and all the stuffs introduced are packed into Editor2.js or Editor2Toolbar.js. IMO, they should finally be moved to some other dedicated files.

Another week is concluded today. The ComboBox widget was migrated to make use of the new PopupContainer and several related bugs were fixed. PopupContainer also received some improvement which makes it more customizable in regards to zIndex values.

The main effort in this week is to continue the enhancement of the Editor2/Editor2Toolbar to be extensible and get rid of hardcoded functions which are not related to the core part.

The issue mentioned in the last weekly report was solved by using another syntax of attaching event to a node.

In my current local copy, all but one (formatSelect) buttons present in tests/widget/test_Editor2.html have been implemented. The approach taken is modeled after FCKeditor (refined version of the proposal in last weekly report):

The principle of EditorCommand is introduced. An EditorCommandis an operation on the editing area. It also provides APIs to retrieve state of the command (Disabled/On/Off). Three items are introduced in Editor2.js:

In order to represent buttons and other more complex elements in the toolbar, ToolbarItem principle is introduced. Normally, every ToolbarItem has an associated EditorCommand. A ToolbarItem can create and/or initialize/modify a DOM node (such as connect onClick to another function to execute the related EditorCommand). In addition, it also encapsulate the code for refreshing the state of the button (such as highlight/unhighlight). One global object and 3 classes are added to Editor2Toolbar.js:

There are several outstanding issues I need to sort out before preparing a patch for peer review:

1. In none-activeX mode under IE, it does not work yet;
2. No matter which toolbar it always operates on the focused editor, this should be prevented when each editor has its own toolbar;
3. selectFormat is not implemented yet;
4. In IE activeX mode, inserthorizentalrule and strikethrough are not supported, need to find a workaround;

Besides fixing bugs related to the code I am working on (mostly widget related), I implemented the initial NamedCommand class in Editor2.js and added several public APIs to dojo.widget.Editor2 for handling commands, such as registering new command (plugins can use it to register new commands) and query which commands are available.

A command class was introduced which has following APIs:

execute() //execute the command
getState() //get the state of the command: Disabled/On/Off

A new class dojo.widget.Editor2.NamedCommand was introduced to wrap the built-in commands in browsers.

The _CurrentInstance was also migrated to getter/setter API, rather than accessing the _CurrentInstance variable directly.

However, when trying to migrate the Editor2Toolbar to make use of the new "Command Principle", I encountered an issue:

In order to eliminate the hard coded command handling functions in Editor2Toolbar, the command name has to be available in the onClick event handler for the buttons (including other controllers, such as a select) in the toolbar. It is possible to add another attribute to the span element which contains the button, such as dojoEditorCmd="bold", and retrieve it from the element e.currentTarget, however this only works in FF, not in IE.

I admit the above approach is not so decent, but I can not come up with another one.

The plan for next week is to propose a way to work around the issue and migrate Editor2/Editor2Toolbar to use it.

This week improving Menu2 related stuffs was my main focus. A new base widget, PopupContainer is introduced in Menu2.js which encapsulates opening in a given position in the screen or around an element, toggle animation integration, sub popup handling and IE bleed through issue workaround. PopupContainer now serves as the base class of PopupMenu2, ToolTip and DropDownContainer. Menu2Manager defined in Menu2.js was renamed to PopupManager.

Two issues in DomWidget were also fixed: #1029 and templateCssString handling bug when no template file/string is specified.

While working on animation integration, two bugs in lfx package were found (thanks to Bill for noticing the issues). I fixed one of them while the other is waiting for Bryan ( #1102).

PopupContainer and PopupManager will eventually be moved into a new file because ToolTip and DropDownContainer only depend on PopupContainer, so no need to include PopupMenu2 and other widgets defined in the Menu2.js file.

I also migrated ComboBox widget to make use PopupMenu2 widget as the popup in my local copy. You can try it here (a profile is dumped at the end of the page). However, Bill was not happy with the performance, so it needs more work to be merged.

The focus manager section in the wiki page GlobalHotkeyAndFocusManager was also updated.

I also started to work on ticket # 1046 (Remove hardcoded event handlers in the Editor2 and Editor2Toolbar to make them extensible).

Next week, I will try to improve the proposal GlobalHotkeyAndFocusManager further given more feedback are received and try to finish ticket # 1046. Of course, bug fixing for the code I am working on is always on my list.

As I moved house unexpected this week, I haven’t put as much effort in dojo development as I would have hoped.

I submitted a patch for ticket #1058 to add keyboard navigation support to popupmenu2 and add other necessary features for it to be used in combo widget. Bill and Becky reviewed it and gave several suggestions. I will modify the patch according to Bill’s suggestion and commit to svn. After that, I will try to modify it to comply with Becky’s accessibility suggestions.

I also prepared a patch for ticket #931, however as Alex did not feel good with the approach, he said he would look for a better way.

In addition, I fixed several other minor issues in the svn.

A draft proposal for centric shortcuts support and focus management is created in the wiki.

Next week, besides finishing the popupmenu2/combobox widgets, I will start to implement ticket #1046 (Remove hardcoded event handlers in the Editor2 and Editor2Toolbar to make them extensible) and fix ticket #1042 (FormatBlock of Editor2 in ActiveX mode does not work)