FCKEditor Notes

More information on FCK Editor is at http://www.fckeditor.net.

Spelling checker

FCKEditor has an optional spell checker that can be downloaded separately. FCKEditor allows full-screen mode which is convenient when working with large text involving a lot of editing.

FCKEditor menus

The FCKEditor menus are different for Record Panel fields and Table Panel fields. This is done to fit FCKEditor’s menus in usually smaller table fields. You can change menu sets by modifying the fckconfig.js and fckconfig_rtl.js (for right-to-left languages) configuration files located in:

...\<AppName>\FCKEditor

Note: be careful not to include any unsupported symbols and preserve the syntax.

Language support

When your application is configured to use multiple languages, FCKEditor switches to the chosen language on fly. However, the full set of languages available in Iron Speed Designer is different than the set of FCKEditor language files. Thus, if FCKEditor doesn’t support a selected language, FCKEditor will fall back to the English language. For example if French is chosen, FCKEditor will use French, but if French-Canadian is chosen, FCKEditor falls back to English. If a particular language not available in the standard FCKEditor language set, you can create your own language file, located in:

...\FCKEditor\editor\lang

See wiki.fckeditor.net for details.

Image upload

FCKEditor has a menu control to upload an image and this control has file browse capabilities. This feature is disabled by default for security reasons, and if enabled, application users will have the ability to browse the server’s hard drive which could be undesirable. You can enable file browsing by editing this configuration file:

...\FCKeditor\editor\filemanager\connectors\asp\config.asp

Set the ‘ConfigIsEnabled’ property to True.

There are two possible ways to upload an image, either using a URL or uploading an image directly from the server. When specifying a URL, FCKEditor will insert tag, such as:

When specifying a file name, you must set the 'ConfigIsEnabled' property to ‘True’. Depending on your server security settings, the application user may or may not be able to retrieve an image from the server’s directory. If the application user is able to do that, meaning that process which owns the application has enough rights to browse a directory (and possibly other security settings), FCKEditor usually will insert tag such as

The file will be physically uploaded and saved in the web server’s \wwwroot\userfiles folder (e.g., C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\userfiles). This will not happen if security settings prohibit the process running your application from accessing this folder.

Content display limitations

There are no restrictions on content formatting and generally you can import or simply copy and paste into the editor window any content from other documents and web sites. However, not everything can be properly shown in your application’s web pages if the field is set to show content as a rich text. Although Iron Speed Designer attempts to preserve your page design, Java scripts, Ajax controls, and other scripting objects can sometimes prevent pop-up controls from operating properly and these controls might not display as expected.

XHTML compliance

Certain versions of FCKEditor are not XHTML compliant. Specifically, its use of the “frameborder” attribute is not W3C compliant.

Emoticon image usage and location

FCKEditor inserts emoticon images such as the smiley face. The URLs for these images point to the image inside your application; these images are not stored in your database. Accordingly, if Microsoft IIS is used to run your application, the relative URL will be:

/MyAppName/FCKEditor/editor/images/smiley/msn/angry_smile.gif

If the ASP.NET development server it used to run your application, the relative URL will be:

/FCKEditor/editor/images/smiley/msn/angry_smile.gif

As long as these images are used in the same application, they will be properly displayed. However, a potential problem may arise when your application via FCKEditor inserts these URLs into a database field as part of the HTML text saved. Because these URLs are relative to the original (inserting) application, other applications using the same database may not be able to access these images located within your original application.