Posted by Hafed | Posted in Forms, oracle, PJCs/Javabeans | Posted on 23-01-2009
Glad to be reporting that I am almost done with the Oracle Forms rich text editor. Some issues with outputting the rich text item thru reports and deciding how to save the contents. For the time being, I checked query and insert modes and the set_custom_property and get_item_property are working fine without any loss.
I am using a text item to store the contents and that’s the column that is physically tied to the table. I think that’s the best way to manage the rich text item. I checked Degrelle’s HTMLPane and that’s how it is being managed.
The JAR file stands now at 170 Kb which is not that big given that I have about 30 Kb for png images (used in the toolbar). However, I am doing now a refactoring and trying to slim the jar down to about 100 Kb. I am not too worried about the size since the file itself is cached the first time the user accesses the module.
The features that already passed testing:
Basic toolbar: in this mode, the user can opt to use only the top bar.
- Basic text styling: bold, italic and underline
- unordered and ordered lists
- Text alignment
- Indent and outdent
Advanced toolbar: more features with most having passed the test
- Cut, copy and paste
- Text Search and replace
- Horizontal rule (HR), break (BR)
- Special Characters insertion
- Adding and removing a hyperlink
- Adding an image (working but some issues)
- Inserting Table, rows and cells
- Font selection, size and color. Foreground property
- Text highlighting color property
- HTML source code editing (working but some issues)
- HTML preview mode
Because of the limited screen real estate available for the rich text item, there are other features that can’t be accessed thru the toolbar buttons. I am using accelerator keys to let the user action them. Some of those are:
- Undo
- Redo
- Deleting table rows
- Deleting table cells
As I mentionned, adding images is a snap. However, I am still pondering about whether to let the user insert an image from a URL or from a drive. The only option I see working for the general case is allowing an image to be referenced fom a URL.
The editor uses a default cascading style sheet. However, there is going to be a way for the developer to assign a company mandated stylesheet.
Likewise, there are a number of properties that can be set from Forms.
That’s the status right now and I think the editor should be out by the end of January 2009.
Last, I am still undecided about the name. May be frmEd. I welcome your suggestions.