Genii Weblog


Civility in critiquing the ideas of others is no vice. Rudeness in defending your own ideas is no virtue.


CoexEdit and importing local images - Bootstrapping a tutorial
Thu 8 Sep 2005, 10:40 AM
After a request from a user in the Genii Support Forum, I decided to build a tutorial to show people how to import local images from your hard drive into FCKEditor, assuming you have made the changes necessary in your database and have CoexEdit 1.1 loaded and running.  The exercise was made more interesting by the fact that I wrote the tutorial with all its steps in FCKEditor using CoexEdit, and used the techniques I was writing about to load the images.  Basically, at each step, I would start to do the step, take a screen print, clean it up and save it as a GIF file from MS Paint, then finish the process already underway and import the image.  This is a rough draft, but it is already a good start, I think.

Importing a Local Image into FCKEditor using CoexEdit (DRAFT)

Inserting an image from your local disk drive requires that you have the slight modifications which are present in the version of FCKEditor available from the Genii Software website.  The two modified files can also be downloaded from the CoexEdit downloads page if you already have FCKEditor 2.0 FC installed on your system.

This tutorial assumes you have the customizations in place, and have made the changes necessary to your database:

1) Start by create a table using the Inline GIF image icon.  We will make it 2 rows by 2 columns.  The Table Properties dialog should look like this:

Table properties dialog box

and the table created should look like this:




 

 

 









2) Now, place the cursor inside the first table cell and click on the Insert/Edit Image button, which looks like Inline GIF image.  If you have the Default toolbar, make sure you do not use the Image Button button, which looks very similar Inline GIF image but is slightly different.  If you are not sure, hold the mouse over the icon and it will say Image Button instead of Insert/Edit Image.  The Image Properties dialog should look like this:

Image properties dialog box

Look carefully in the upper right corner.  If there are two buttons, one of which says Browse Server and the other of which says Browse Local, you have the correct FCKEditor customizations.  If you only have a Browse Server button, you do not have the customizations.

3) Click on the Browse Local button.  This will bring up another dialog box, which should look like the following, although it may be larger:

Browse local images dialog box

4) Click on the Browse... button, and traverse the standard directory structure to find a local image.  The dialog should look something like this:

File picker dialog box

and after selecting an image, the Browse Local Images dialog would contain a path to the image.

5) Click the Upload button from that dialog, which will return you to the Image Properties  dialog.  Two important things should be noted here.  The first is that the URL shown in the Image Properties dialog will not be the local path, but instead will point to an uploaded image in your database.  This is a temporary image that will be removed once CoexEdit moves the image into an in-line image.  The second thing to note is that the image you uploaded will appear in the preview, but it may take a second or two.  It may appear briefly as a broken image before showing as a proper image.  This delay is the time the indexer in your database takes to index the image so it can be found.  The dialog should look something like this:

Image properties dialog box with preview

6) When the image is showing in the preview (and not before), click on the OK button and the image should appear in the table cell, like that below:


Clock
 

 

 






7) Continue adding images to other cells, as well as text and more.  These images will all point to temporary image files in your database until your save.  When you save, CoexEdit will convert these to in-line images and delete the temporary images.

Copyright © 2005 Genii Software Ltd.

Read / Twitter / Facebook / E-mail Comments (2)
Method of the Day: ReplaceText
Thu 8 Sep 2005, 06:54 AM
When I posted Method of the Day: AppendHotspot, people responded with surprise that one method could be good for so much.  I thought that it would be good to show another mild mannered method which becomes a supermethod when you fully understand it, the ReplaceText method.

It may be hard to imagine just what the ReplaceText  method might do besides replace text, but that is why I am writing this.  To follow the format from the last post, here are recent questions for which the answer is the ReplaceText method.

Q. Can I search for a string in a rich text field and replace it with another without hurting the format of the surrounding text and without losing images and tables?
A. Sure.  Just use code such as:
Call rtitem.ConnectBackend(doc.Handle, "Body")
Set rtchunk = rtitem.DefineChunk("Everything")
Call rtchunk.ReplaceText(searchstring, replacestring)
Q. Can I search for a wildcard string in a rich text field and replace it?
A. Sure.  Just use code such as:
Call rtitem.ConnectBackend(doc.Handle, "Body")
Set rtchunk = rtitem.DefineChunk("Everything")
rtchunk.TextWildCards = True
searchstring = "SRN*001"
replacestring = "OBSOLETE PRODUCT NUMBER"
Call rtchunk.ReplaceText(searchstring, replacestring)
Q. Can I change the URL inside a URL hotspot?
A. Sure.  Just use code such as:
Call rtitem.ConnectBackend(doc.Handle, "Body")
Set rtchunk = rtitem.DefineChunk("Everything")
Call rtchunk.ReplaceText("www.notes.net", "http://www-130.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus", "URL")

Also see the new Replace URLs sample db on the Midas Rich Text LSX sample dbs page.  
Q. Can I change hide-when formulas with Midas?
A. Sure.  Just use code such as:
Call rtitem.ConnectBackend(doc.Handle, "Body")
Set rtchunk = rtitem.DefineChunk("Everything")
Call rtchunk.ReplaceText("@UserName", "@V2UserName", "HideWhen")

Watch for the new Hide-When sample sample db coming soon to the Midas Rich Text LSX sample dbs page.  
Q. Can I change section titles?
A. Sure.  Just use code such as:
Call rtitem.ConnectBackend(doc.Handle, "Body")
Set rtchunk = rtitem.DefineChunk("Everything")
Call rtchunk.ReplaceText("Sumary", "Summary", "NonText")

Q. Can I change action hotspots?
A. Sure.  Just use code such as:
Call rtitem.ConnectBackend(doc.Handle, "Body")
Set rtchunk = rtitem.DefineChunk("ActionHotspot *")
Call rtchunk.ReplaceText("@UserName", "@V2UserName", "Formula")


URLs in hotspots?  Formulas in action hotspots?  Hide-when formulas?  Pretty powerful for search and replace, don't you think?

Copyright © 2005 Genii Software Ltd.

Read / Twitter / Facebook / E-mail Comments (1)