Question

Is there a way in Orbeon to save TextAreas and RTEs as CDATA sections so that line breaks and other formatting inputted by the user is preserved? In some use cases it’s really important not to change what the user has entered and I haven’t found a way to accomplish this to date.

Thanks!

Answer 1

In general, formatting and line breaks should be preserved by default. If the input is modified, there are three possible “culprits”: the RTE component itself, Tagsoup, and clean-html.xsl. There are certain limitations regarding the RTE component (AFAIK orbeon still uses YUI 2), for example it doesn’t handle p elements correctly. Tagsoup and clean-html.xsl should let through most of the standard html elements, but they filter, for example, the canvas element. More on orbeon’s RTE element:

http://wiki.orbeon.com/forms/doc/developer-guide/xforms-controls/textarea-control#TOC-Rich-text-editor-HTML-editor-

So, if the content that arrives at your xforms instance is modified, you will need to debug each of the processing steps to check where the modification took place.

If it’s a matter of the RTE component, you could try to check if the TinyMCE XBL component works better for you (it uses TinyMCE instead of the YUI2 RTE – i posted it some months ago in the ops-users ML). If it’s a Tagsoup matter, you will have to patch the source code (change the Tagsoup config); there’s also a workaround to configure Tagsoup using an external config file (it should be available in the ML archives, too). If it’s a clean-html.xsl issue, you can easily created your own clean-html.xsl, it’s described in the wiki page (see above) HTH fs