Extending (improving) microsoft's HTML editor control? Discuss!
-
Have any of you created any custom additions to Microsoft's HTML editor control? I have a bunch of features I'd like to implement, including:
- locking of certain portions of an html page so that only specified blocks can be edited. When the user tries to do anything, for example, selecting text, clicking a table, etc, they'd simply get a "not allowed" cursor icon and clicking a locked area would have no effect.
- a vastly improved table editor! I'd like to implement a table editor similar that functions similarly to dreamweaver's table editor. Microsoft's table editor sucks. Various things would need to be overridden, i'd imagine, including how tables respond to various events (click, drag, drop, etc).
Have you ever attempted anything like this? I'd really like to know what the limitations of the html editor control are before I start to invest a whole bunch of time trying to do these things only to come to brick wall halfway through development. Also, I'm open to making this free if anyone wants to help me. Naturally I'll be using C# and implementing it as a custom winforms control. NATHAN RIDLEY Web Application Developer email: nathan @ netlab.com.au [remove the spaces before and after the @ symbol]
-
Have any of you created any custom additions to Microsoft's HTML editor control? I have a bunch of features I'd like to implement, including:
- locking of certain portions of an html page so that only specified blocks can be edited. When the user tries to do anything, for example, selecting text, clicking a table, etc, they'd simply get a "not allowed" cursor icon and clicking a locked area would have no effect.
- a vastly improved table editor! I'd like to implement a table editor similar that functions similarly to dreamweaver's table editor. Microsoft's table editor sucks. Various things would need to be overridden, i'd imagine, including how tables respond to various events (click, drag, drop, etc).
Have you ever attempted anything like this? I'd really like to know what the limitations of the html editor control are before I start to invest a whole bunch of time trying to do these things only to come to brick wall halfway through development. Also, I'm open to making this free if anyone wants to help me. Naturally I'll be using C# and implementing it as a custom winforms control. NATHAN RIDLEY Web Application Developer email: nathan @ netlab.com.au [remove the spaces before and after the @ symbol]
What you want is possible, although not easy. You can host either the WebBrowser control or the MSHTML component through COM interop assemblies. The WebBrowser control hosts the MSHTML component and provides additional services you may want, like hyperlinking and additional communication with the host. In order to extend it, you must declare managed interfaces like
IDocHostUIHandler. These advanced hosting interfaces are documented in MSDN in the Advanced Hosting Reference[^]. If you want to generate an interop assembly for these interfaces, read the article Using MSHTML Advanced Hosting Interfaces[^] here on CodeProject. If you don't want to go to all that work (because there's quite a bit involved), take a look at some of the third-party solutions out there. We just settled on the NET.RIX[^] component, which has both a full and lite version with what you want already. It's also affordably priced and royalty free.Microsoft MVP, Visual C# My Articles
-
What you want is possible, although not easy. You can host either the WebBrowser control or the MSHTML component through COM interop assemblies. The WebBrowser control hosts the MSHTML component and provides additional services you may want, like hyperlinking and additional communication with the host. In order to extend it, you must declare managed interfaces like
IDocHostUIHandler. These advanced hosting interfaces are documented in MSDN in the Advanced Hosting Reference[^]. If you want to generate an interop assembly for these interfaces, read the article Using MSHTML Advanced Hosting Interfaces[^] here on CodeProject. If you don't want to go to all that work (because there's quite a bit involved), take a look at some of the third-party solutions out there. We just settled on the NET.RIX[^] component, which has both a full and lite version with what you want already. It's also affordably priced and royalty free.Microsoft MVP, Visual C# My Articles
Wow that NET.RIX control looks great! I think I'll go that way and save time. thanks :) NATHAN RIDLEY Web Application Developer email: nathan @ netlab.com.au [remove the spaces before and after the @ symbol]