Tridion 2009 C# Powertool that uses the Tridion wysywig editor

Question

I'm working on a power tool that editors can use to update a component. Why we want this is not important right now ;p...

I'm using CKEditor for the rich text options. http://docs.cksource.com/CKEditor_3.x/Developers_Guide/Minimum_Setup

But I would prefer to use the Tridion wysywig editor. Why? Well for one controlling component linking. I wasn't able to do so, that's why I used the CKEditor but would love to replace it with the Tridion editor. So my hopes are on you guys :-)

Update (feedback to Alvin's answer):

Thanks Alvin, I don’t have any problems writing the component data back to Tridion, neither do I have any problems getting rich text editing to work (3rd party control).

My only problem is that I would like to use as much Tridion functionality. The component that I'm writing this Powertool for has 500+ (embedded) fields and is slow when editing in Tridion. But it's super fast using my own creation.

Now I want to take it to the next step by adding Tridion rich text editing to use things like component linking, and embedding images loaded from Tridion, etc. which I can't do using the 3rd-party control.

So for me opening the component using the component popup from Tridion has no value since it will be as slow as it is now in Tridion. Changing from embedded to multiple component could be a solution. But the editor does not want this (there are reasons why not). I think I will try to reverse engineer the item selector that John refers to.

Answer 1

Is there something in the SDL Tridion RTF field that you don't like, or do you have an external application that you are using to update the components?

It's possible to extend the CKE with your own functionality (see here). I suspect it wouldn't be too difficult to integrate the Item selector power tool (From the SDL World site) into the CKE. Update: I see this was a question about Tridion 2009 - In this case I'd start with the item selector on this screen and reverse engineer it from the 2011 core service using the TDSE / Com + library. This will likely mean that the application must run on the same server.

I'd store the component link into the CKEcontent in the same format used by the CMS editor (<a tridion:href=""..>) so you can make use of OTB SDL Tridion building blocks.

Good luck.

Answer 2

I'm not sure the "field builder" approach was available before SDL Tridion 2011. Consider adding an option to select items by copying an example from PowerTools, otherwise a Custom URL or GUI Extension are other ways to change the component editing form itself.

Selection in a 2009 Extension The R5.2/5.3/2009 PowerTools has examples for selecting items. For example Quirijn Slings' schema2CT asp page has:

<a href="javascript:;" onClick="selectItem(document.all.pubid, document.all.displayPub, 1); return false">Publication</a>

I haven't worked on the old tools directly and maybe someone could clarify, but I understand the old PowerTools relied on code in \Library\JavaScript.

Custom URL. Alternatively, to get a custom editing page with values stored back into a Tridion component, consider a Custom Url approach to "extend" the components, similar to Frank van Puffelen's Google Maps extension. The example shows how you might combine markup with some script to save possibly plain text back into a Tridion field.

Extend Existing Forms Most GUI extension examples online are from 2011 and later, however, Yoav Niran shared how to create a JQuery GUI extensions in this post, this would let you run additional JavaScript in the context of a given Tridion item type (such as a component editing field).