Rich Edit / Word Processing Control for IntraWeb (Delphi VCL for the Web)?

Question

I am experimenting with Intraweb right now, for a few small personal-use web apps I am wanting to develop. Learning time is at a premium, so I am very attracted to intraWeb due to Delphi experience transferring so well and immediately -- just messing around with it today, I managed to get a data-driven web app up and running, almost effortlessly. (Basically, I say all that as a answer to why I'm not pursuing this in ASP.NET). I have very little / no web development experience, so I was thrilled to be able to pull off so easily. :-)

ANYWAY.... apologies if I'm too excited. That's the preface / context... Here is my question:

For one app I'm wanting to develop, it would be REALLY nice to have some built-in rich-text / word processing / editor control -- as easy / "plug and play" as possible. Something akin to what WPTools offers for Win32 apps, or FCKeditor appears to offer as a web control, or TinyMCE, which seems to have lots of fans. Could either of these last two be integrated into an data-driven IntraWeb app? -- if so, where can I learn more re: the "how" of that?

Note: I am fine buying a third-party component if necessary to solve this problem.

Thanks for any and all input!

Answer 1

Looks like the best fit for your needs would be TTIWHTMLEdit or TTIWDBHTMLEdit, part of the TMS Component Pack Pro for IntraWeb (125 Euros currently). Here's an online demo, though it seems they have not hooked up all of the formatting buttons.

Since TinyMCE is Javascript-based, it should be usable embedded in an Intraweb page. Have you looked at the TIWForm.JavaScript property and similar? The Intraweb online help has a section on embedding Javascript.

I strongly encourage you to ask on the Intraweb newsgroup if you don't get satisfaction here (or in parallel...). It's likely that someone has a ready solution. Even the original author of Intraweb, Chad Hower, pipes in on the peer-support group, and Jackson Gomes is often very responsive. While developing in Intraweb, the AtoZed priority support is worth considering - particularly if you're already prepared to get something third- (or fourth?) party - the AtoZed team really work to help you find solutions and fix issues. Paid for itself many times over when I had an Intraweb project in the works.

The peer-support NNTP group is atozedsoftware.intraweb on news.atozed.com

Answer 2

We let the users upload whatever files they want as a substitute for spending a long time typing nicely formatted HTML into our Intraweb app with the TMS components mentioned above. The hypothesis is that users are more adept at having a word processor do what they want rather than getting HTML to look like they want.

The IWFile component makes the upload process fairly painless. Standard web restrictions apply, i.e., they have to select the file, the program cannot do it for them. We disallow suspicious file extensions (*.bat, *.exe, etc.) as well. We also disable normal navigation within the app when they are on the upload page, as they would lose the file selection they made.

So our users can type in short regular text comments on each section of each page of our Intraweb app, or type in one large regular text comment for whatever purpose they want, or upload formatted text attachments with an optional note on what section or page to which the uploaded file is applicable.