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We are looking for an ASP.NET compatible data grid that allows for multi-line editing similar to Excel or a WinForms data grid. It must also support very basic keyboard input (tab, arrow keys, return). Note that we are not looking for Excel capabilities (functions, formatting, formulas) ... just a grid for fast data entry.
I've looked at Telerik, Infragistics, ComponentOne, DevExpress, and many others ... all their support teams have said that the controls either do not support multi-line, or do so in such a clunky way that it would be unusable.
Has anyone used any Excel-like grids that they can recommend? The client-side grids seemed closer to what we needed, with Sigma Widgets ( example ) being the closest I've found so far. Extjs's grid was too inflexible, and the jQuery grid was too buggy.
It does not exist today. There are products such as those you have mentioned which have tried, but in my experience none of them will make an experienced Excel user happy.
My company makes Excel compatible spreadsheet components for use with Windows Forms and ASP.NET. We have been getting this question for years, so we have of course considered building one because it looks like a good business. But HTML / JavaScript is just not a suitable platform for building something which "feels right" to users who want it to work like Excel - IMO.
We have settled on the idea of building a spreadsheet control for Silverlight. I believe this will give you the best of both worlds - cross platform rich interactive spreadsheet in the browser which any Excel user would be comfortable with. Unfortunately, that is not going to happen this month or next...
At my previous company, we actually built a spreadsheet component as a Netscape Plugin, as an ActiveX control and as a Java Applet. They had a little bit of success, but none of these technologies ever became ubiquitous in the enterprise for various reasons. I believe Microsoft is finally getting it right with Silverlight and that Silverlight will become the gold standard for browser based Line of Business applications in the Enterprise.
EDIT:
I should have mentioned that the product I alluded to above is Formula One / NET (Netscape Plugin released ~1995), Formula One / ActiveX and Formula One for Java - which is now sold by Actuate as e.Spreadsheet. I left in 2002, but AFAIK they still maintain the Java Applet which is probably the best example of an Excel like UI in the browser (I have no interest in the product any more - in fact we compete to some extent with e.Spreadsheet and intend to have a better answer with a Silverlight control in the future). I did not mention it by name in my original answer because it is a Java product - not a .NET product - but it is a potential answer even for an ASP.NET web site.
Lloyd Cotten correctly comments that Google Docs is an example of a spreadsheet built with HTML / JavaScript. Lloyd says Google Docs "definitely 'feels right' in its similarity to Excel". While I respect Lloyd's opinion, in my experience Google Docs does not 'feel right'. Perhaps this is because I'm a spreadsheet guy. I do know that we talk to potential customers almost every day who are trying to solve the problem of the OP, and they have all looked and cannot find one they are happy with - but of course they would not be calling us if they had so we are dealing with a biased sample and I understand that.
So I just want to clarify that there are in fact plenty of examples of HTML / JavaScript grids and spreadsheets which are usable. It's just that I don't want to have to use them because I expect certain keys to do certain things and a particular level of responsiveness which is just not there today with any of the HTML / JavaScript solutions I have tried (and I look at them regularly because my company could definitely sell such a product if it were feasible to build one that we could be proud of).
How about FarPoint Spread?
I'm in the middle on evaluating FarPoint Spread for ASP.NET, and so far I've been happy with the result.
We ended up using Sigma Grid ... thanks for all the other replies!
Well.. not sure, but I am looking for something similar and I found:
Nitobi
Not sure if it does exactly what you want, although youcan definately move around with cursor keys, and edit inline....
EDIT
Also Essential Objects have a good editor too... seems very like excel...
http://demo.essentialobjects.com/Default.aspx?path=Grid_i1_i20
RealWorld Grid is probably what you are looking for. I'm using it in my projects, and it works perfectly.
Here's their CooglePlex page
I don't think it supports the arrow keys, but it makes multirow editing a breeze.
p.s. seems like you're looking for client-side grids ... this one is server-side. I'll leave the comment there, somebody might find it useful.
I have used the Infragistics grid with success. However, the learning curve is huge (and there's practically no support) and I don't know if there is multi-line editing.
I've used Syncfusion's components and they're quite good, they boast an "Excel-like" editor, though I didn't see multi-line mentioned.
For intranet and IE users Office Web components can be an option. While flying in the face of all things a good web application should be, they let users feel at home in office on the web.
I had great success using the pivot table control combined with MS OLAP a few years ago. User loved it and no wheels needed to be reinvented.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=982B0359-0A86-4FB2-A7EE-5F3A499515DD&displaylang=EN
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc164070.aspx
I think http://codethat.com/grid/ is quite good!
Excel Like GridView allows for multiline editing and navigating using the arrow keys, as well as resizing columns and rows.
http://darkroastjava.wordpress.com/2010/04/28/creating-an-excel-like-grid-for-asp-net/ is an extension of that which also supports pasting multi-cell values from the clipboard.
Unfortunately, both only work in IE so far, but that meets my personal needs at this point of time.
dhtmlxGrid (client-side, JavaScript grid) supports multiline feature (demo), keyboard navigation and comes with server-side connector for ASP.NET. In case, someone is still looking for such a grid. Disclosure: I'm a part of the DHTMLX team.
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My question is simple and straight forward - Is DevExpress fast enough for real world web application. We're using DevExpress in our company to build a CRM for a client and every page has got lots of controls and its damn slow. On my development server it takes 10sec for a page with around 20 controls to load. Is this good or bad? And can you guys point me to a real life DevExpress application except the ones given on the case study section.
I realize that this question is quite old and the original author has probably long since made a decision. However, when I was personally directed by my company to use DevExpress and I was trying to eek out all of the performance that I could, a Google search would always point to this thread and many like it across the internet. There's always a question, a few anecdotal responses, and usually a PR response from somebody that works for DevExpress. I rarely find honest answers from experienced people.
In the past, I've used Telerik, Infragistic, and DevExpress. From a performance and maintenance perspective, DevExpress is the worst. All of their controls have odd properties and accessors that do not align with what somebody that is familiar with ASP.NET or even HTML would expect. Since the properties and accessors of the controls are so convoluted, you will find that you've written about twice as many lines of code that are necessary in a normal .NET application.
DevExpress controls are rendered out as hugely bloated, nested tables. Some controls expose a lightweight rendering mode that is better, but their styling and functionality do not match with the other DevExpress controls, and I found them to be quite buggy in cross-browser testing.
Custom styling requires many, many custom CSS selectors that force you to code DevExpress class names into your CSS, due to the nested and hidden nature of the control properties. This is very bad practice, since DevExpress can and should be able to change their internal CSS class names whenever they see fit.
These controls also make an absurd number of GET requests to their DXR.axd handler that serves up resources.
There's no doubt that their controls work fine in a Demo environment with only 1 control displayed on the screen, but in the real world, these controls are terrible and should be avoided. Implement your own controls or just download Bootstrap and use native ASP.NET controls. I replaced DevExpress with controls that I created that style the native HTML type that gets rendered from .NET and the following chart illustrates some of the differences in resource usage between the two. There were no changes to the page layout, business layer, data layer, or database code for this swap, just a replacement of DevExpress controls that I'd previously optimized and tried to squeeze every bit of performance out of with my own controls.
Chart Comparing DevExpress to Custom Controls
That's bad, but I wouldn't point straight at the DevExpress controls when assigning blame - I'd be running a profiler against my code to work out where the issue really is.
Soham,
As a general rule, when designing for the web, try to keep your pages light so they can run faster. For example, do you absolutely need 20 controls on one page?
And if they do not need any special functionality then you can use the native rendering.
Also, check out my article on the DevExpress web.config settings to improve performance.
Btw, I work for DevExpress. :)
I have no DevExpress experience, but you may also want to check out Improving Asp.net performance. It might help out as well.
2016 - Over the last 5 years I have used Infragistics, Dev Express, Telerik in that order.
Infragistics I won't even get started on because it is a subject unto itself.
My biggest pet peeve with Dev Express is their controls do add some "bloat" to the overall result. However, some controls do have feature sets that are worthy of the bloat. Certainly their Grid and Pivot grid are complex tools that allow the user to do many things, and i have successfully implemented Devexpress packages that worked both quickly with very good results. I have two problems with Dev Express:
Every time I install a new version, it breaks a significant amount of code, that's both WebForms and MVC implementations. That is quite frustrating, but as programmers to be expected I guess.
They really don't look very nice, you have to go through significant effort to get the to look anything close to a bootstrap table etc. Once done though they do allow all the needed bells and whistles. You could of course as the authors above suggest grow your own, that's always an option, but it's not why people buy controls. They are trying to leverage their time so that they can implement faster of course.
Having said all this, Telerik is the current best of breed, in my opinion by far. Easier to implement, grids are fast, have proper desirable functionality and look better.
If you use 20 Controls containing Textboxes with formlayouts, probably the Server takes a hard time to render that page containing alot of hierarchy of long tags in it. DevExpress is bad on having multiple Controls. Redering one ASPxTextbox Control could take KB compared to hundreds of byte on ASP.net Textbox control.
It very common for an entry page to have more than 20 controls. I did use devexpress for years, the speed and performance are acceptable. We use to build ERP solution.
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We started a new project and the nature of the project is very interactive and a Rich UI is required.
We would need a set of controls that would require for Rich UI development. I found Obout while googling. I never heard about them and never seen fellow members telling me such name except Telerik, ComponentOne, NetAdvantage. These are the famous names we heard but no this one.
But, the controls give a positive feeling. But as two things matter always when you are buying some services: How good are their customer support? and How much feasible their price is?
Another, how quickly they release patches/updates? As, what if we find a bug or an error during development what will going to happen? Do they provide a quick solution for this?
I'm bit confused making a decision here. I need your assistance, experience and feedback.
I've used Obout controls before. They are definitely lesser known than something like Telerik or ComponentOne, but they've been around for quite a while and definitely put out a quality product. They are also a good deal less expensive. Overall I had a very positive experience with them and never had any trouble with support requests at all. My first experience with them was about 5 years ago and they were very good then, and they've only gotten better.
I don't know specifically how quickly they put out releases, but I can tell you that over the past few years they have released a whole lot of new stuff. I believe you can download all the controls and try them out before you buy them, so I would encourage you to do that. If it meets your needs and you find it easier to use than the alternatives then go for it.
Also check out this question to see some additional feedback: Obout controls in C# .Net
Don't think so. I bought their suite and everytime i tried to use one of their controls, it sucked.
Example 1.
I use their grid and want to take advantage of the filtering options. For 400 records, the grid only filters in the twenty records that are on the first page. So it leaves out the majority of the records. I got in contact with their support and i sent them the files they asked for. That was five month ago and despite repeated tries and emails, i never got an answer.
Example 2:
Today i am using their datepicker. Nice try, but it opens in a weird position on the page and there is no possibility to change that.
We have been using their tools for over a year now, and we are very pleased with them. The cost is a fraction of what the competition is charging. They work great, they look nice and it reduced our development so that our project was completed two months before expected, even with learning the new tools.
The learning curve is a little steep, but that goes for any of the comparable packages. The tech support sucks, by email only. When we first purchased it they had a support forum and you could find most of your answers in the forum, but sadly they did away wit hit. Now it takes a few days to get a response. But when doing an entire application, we had plenty of pages to work on while waiting for responses. Most of the time they pointed out the problems or told us how to resolve them. And I sent them many messages telling them to disregard previous queries, having found the answers on the internet.
Their examples are simple, and if your needs are simple they will suffice. If building a full-blown application to replace a legacy application and run your business, such as we did, you need better support. Still, it was money well spent. We use the grid and filters to perform searches on our client database of 200,000 records, and can usually find the person we need in less than 10 keystrokes by name alone. Performance is very good on our intranet.
I will note that when I thought I had found bugs in the software, it was just me. A comma where a period should be, bad capitalization, misuse of functions, etc. Javascript is very sensitive with it's syntax and not friendly with error messages, so much time was spent going over code to discover the not-so-obvious errors.
And our demands are probably beyond most peoples needs, our main screen has a combination of a superform and 7 data grids, each of which pops up a modal form for data entry, all within the same web page. But it does the job well. All in all, we have about 60 data entry pages and another 60 reporting pages we created with the oBout tools. The reporting pages allow the users to set report criteria (i.e. dates, clients, products, etc. using popups, calendars, radio buttons, etc.) and pass these to SSRS reports, a sort of ad-hoc reporting. So we created a projects with over 125 web pages and over 150 reports in less than one year, quite an achievement considering the small workforce.
If I were you I'd look strongly at using jQuery and the hundreds of great plug-ins that will provide just about any functionality you need. jQuery is heavily supported and best of all it's free (open source).
It will provide all the client-side functionality you need and it's VERY easy to work with. One of the things you really need to use jQuery is to have control over the id and names of your HTML controls (DOM elements). When you use those third-party control packs (and most of the built-in ones in .net too) you typically lose a good deal of control of the HTML they produce. You can either wait for asp.net 4.0 to come out which will resolve the control id issues or rely on repeater controls and have complete control over the ids and other HTML it produces.
It's well worth the small investment in learning jQuery and the repeater control if you haven't done so already.
I used Obout controls several years ago (from memory, their ASP.Net TreeView and Slidemenu).
I think I had to contact them on a couple of occasions, and received prompt support both times, solving the problem we had.
However, whether their controls (in terms of UI, API) meet your expectations is quite a personal thing- the support is good, but you might find that you don't like the look of them, or the API doesn't fit in with the way you do things (although it was fine for me). You should really evaluate them yourself and see how you get on with them.
if you don't need something too well integrated into asp.net, definetly have a look at extjs. its THE rich ui library.
I am using Obout controls. And clearly I would have done another choice If I could. The controls are bulky and quite often buggy when you try to inherits from them. A poor choice to me.
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I am looking for a library to convert HTML to PDF, including styles. I would prefer it be able to accept a URL as an option, but if required, HTML can be passed in as a stream/byte array with all styles in a single file/buffer. I am using C# / ASP.Net 3.5. I have complete control of the server machine ( I can run as a service, etc... ) however, I cannot require the user to be logged in, so no application level or print driver type solutions please.
I know there exist free solutions like PDFSharp, but these still require you to format your output properly. I want the library to generate almost identical output to the source input, which this library doesn't provide ( or at least, I believe it doesn't, correct me if I am wrong ).
I also know there are a number of commercial products available. Some of them are a few thousand dollars, which is beyond my current budget for this feature. There is one library ABCPDF which seems to do exactly what I want to do, for a price I can afford to pay. That said, the lack of professionalism/polish on their website has me a bit wary.
If you have experience with ABCpdf, or can recommend a similar library ( price feature wise ), I would greatly appreciate it.
EDIT: Thanks all for the answers. Sounds like abcPDF or aspPDF are the way to go, and both are within budget.
I use and highly recommend ABCPDF for what you need. I use it to pdf complicated html reports (nested tables & lots of css, & charts). It works fantastic pointing it to a url.
As a bonus it supports the page-break-inside: avoid css.
Back when I wrote classic asp, I used their ABCUpload product, which is also fantastic.
Not a recommendation but....
Stay away from iTextSharp for HTML -> PDF. Its the only "approved" PDF gen lib my current employer allows. We've spend endless hours trying to convert HTML to PDF...its just not what its good for. iTextSharp is great for PDF versions of forms
I have used ABCPDF in the past and it is a very good product for the price.
I have had to use their support as well and they were very quick at dealing with an extremely obscure issue. Good communication and turn around time. I think it was 2 days from the time I put in a ticket to the time a solution was found and resolved.
They have also been very easy to work with with respect to licensing as we have had to buy older licenses that were no longer available (so that an existing product did not need to be retested).
Before settling on ABCPDF we tried 2 or 3 open source products but none had the flexibility or level of support we were happy with.
Here is a link to a thread that I commented on that was looking for a similar product:
Generate HTML To PDF Control for the .NET application
We use ExpertPDF's HtmlToPdf converter, which is pretty nice. Our company has an old license, but many new features have been added. It is pretty straightforward using CSS.
http://www.html-to-pdf.net/
ASPPDF supports HTML to PDF including stylesheets.
http://www.asppdf.com/index.html
But, commercial.
I was using aspPDF but from Persist Software, and it works very fine for my project.
It is very impressive, and it has support from a company developing asp components since the beggining of the ASP.
You can check very good live demos at: http://www.asppdf.com/livedemo.html
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As a little side project, I am starting to build a new website for a certain organization I am affiliated to, which current site is simply outdated.
I am regularly a Java developer, and last time I really did some web development was back in the late 90s, when <p> was still more popular than <div> and Javascript was cutting-edge technology (JQuery is for lazy bums these days :) ).
Anyway, I feel really outdated. The website basically is going to be:
Django based
mostly serve static information pages
it will have a dynamic news and updates page (based on Django admin capabilites)
and some basic apps I'll develop myself (polls, small registration app, etc...)
My problem is designing the whole thing. I found some nice web-based CSS layout generators that got me going, but I still feel I'm wasting my time smoothing out the CSS files and aligning <div>s.
Are there any tools - the simpler and faster, the better - that you recommend I can use to speed up the design part of the site so I can concentrate on the real work?
I don't need anything fancy, just a nice looking layout and design that I can tweak a bit so the site will look presentable.
I second Brandon's suggestion to use a CSS framework. It won't give you 100% freedom to design anything you like, but it can speed up your design process greatly and free up your hands to do the coding you really want.
Suggestions Updated July 2013:
Twitter Bootstrap http://twitter.github.io/bootstrap/ - complete grid, typo, UI widget prototyping framework
ZURB Foundation http://foundation.zurb.com/ - responsive grid, type, UI widget prototyping framework (similar in scope to Twitter Bootstrap, but feels 'cleaner' in some ways)
960 http://960.gs/ - grid layout system
Tripoli http://devkick.com/lab/tripoli/ - really good typography, but no grid system
YUI Grids http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/grids/ - very customizable (to the point of overkill) grid system
Blueprint http://www.blueprintcss.org/ - grid system and basic typography
BlueTrip http://www.bluetrip.org - a hybrid system, mixing the best of the Blueprint grid with the best of the Tripoli typography
I won't lie to you. This website isn't the best place to go if you're looking for reliable Web Design advice. Stack Overflow is a programming community and programmers rarely know anything about design. If you want to get some real advice then I would strongly recommend the main Web Design/Development forums on the Internet, especially SitePoint.
That being said, as a former freelance Web Designer/Developer I'll offer my input on the issue. Not that you should value it, of course. After all, this is a programming website.
NEVER EVER SAY CSS LAYOUT GENERATOR EVER AGAIN! If you're going to seriously get into designing web pages then you need to learn semantic XHTML and CSS first. Whilst many people tout W3Schools as the definitive resource I see it as a programmers answer (i.e. not very good) and would prefer that you read up on the subject using...Google. There are countless examples of great websites to pick up the basics of Web Design/Development that Google is probably the best website for the job. Also, with a plethora of new websites offering this information you know it's going to be more improved than W3Schools. You'll seriously want to get clued-up on writing your design because it'll be much harder to fix things later on in the project.
If you're going to be designing web pages it would be a good idea to learn what actually makes a good design. Check out CSS Vault for a fantastic resource of some of the best-designed web pages around, of course with all the source code intact so you can have a play around with their code and see how they've managed some of the wonderful effects they've produced. I've learnt more than a thing or two from websites that have been featured on CSS Vault. On top of that you should read up on Web Design from the big Web Design/Development sites. Two of my favourites are SitePoint and A List Apart, two names that you'll near time and time again when you hear people talk about resources. Browse those websites, check their forums, see what REAL Web Designers/Developers are using, not what programmers are using.
On the subject of CSS Frameworks; they do help! The problem with using them is that you'll often spend so much time looking for a worthwhile framework that you could have finished most of the CSS for your website yourself. You'll either love them or hate them, but many people will say that they're not necessary.
Once you've got your mind set on what a good design looks like and you've got the resources you need to make something of value I suggest that you get to work! In reality when you're designing a web page all you really need is a text editor with a save function, an image manipulation program, a browser window and FireBug. An IDE helps a lot of people, but if you do use one then you'll definitely want to work in its text mode. I use NotePad++ or Emacs exclusively but a lot of people like to use Aptana Studio, so it may be worth a look.
When you're getting to actually building the code behind your website you can't really go much worse than your favourite IDE/Text Editor and a source control tool. As a Java programmer you're better suited to talk about programming so I won't lecture you on a subject you already know.
In the end, Web Design is going to take time and many of the tools that we choose to use that we claim will "save time" save very little in reality. If you're not a design guru then it will take you a substantial amount of time to create a great-looking website. It's a fact of life. Call me old-fashioned (a funny word coming from a 21 year old) but I still think that the quickest way is to sketch a design out on a piece of paper (a image program if really necessary) and to just get out there and make the damn thing! Again, I'll have to take this hunting for the silver bullet mentality as a programmers trait, one that really won't help that much when designing, because designing a web page is vastly different to writing a Java program.
In short, ignore everything you read here, read what REAL designers are doing and just make the damn thing!
There's one piece of advice that saves more time than any other when it comes to rapid development of CSS styled sites and that's KEEP IT SIMPLE
Use an attractive simple layout that doesn't require pixel perfection and that can 'gracefully' degrade in less compliant browsers (IE6). Minimise the amount of CSS and fix the basic bugs mentioned by meouw above. Then get on an concentrate on content and functionality...the real work
In my previous employment I created dozens of templates for websites.
The most useful too I ever discovered is the Firefox Web Developer Toolbar.
It has a wealth of small useful tools. My favorite feature is the ability to edit the CSS and see the results in real-time. This saves on the whole edit - upload - refresh cycle. Watch out for ie CSS inconsistencies though!
Off the top of my head, these are the most important gotchas.
double margin bug [google: double margin bug]
incorrect (but more intuitive) box model [google: box model]
incorrect (but more intuitive) float clearing [google: clearfix]
FireBug is another really usefull Firefox plugin for more in depth analysis.
I've always found Open Source Web Design to be a good resource when looking to get started trying to design something.
- http://patterntap.com/
- http://www.dotemplate.com/ (interesting concept of customizing template)
- http://www.templatemonster.com/
- http://www.freelayouts.com/websites/html-templates
- http://www.templateyes.com/
No idea what the site is going to be, but have you thought of using a pre-build CMS like Drupal, Joomla etc etc.? You can then tweak templates etc, rather than worrying about making it from scratch.
This question is pretty old, but since we're in 2012, it's only proper that I answer my own question with the exact thing I was looking for, back in 2009.
Twitter Bootstrap
Have you looked into any CSS frameworks? If you are competent enough with CSS something like a framework could help speed things up.
Don't forget firebug :) if you're worried about tweaking the design it's really great. With the inspect feature allowing you to real-time edit the CSS of your page.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843
I second Jens Roland's list of CSS frameworks.
But I would also suggest you have a look at websites such as Smashing Magazine. You might find this article of interest, amongst a lot of others. They tend to do a lot of nice and long mash-ups for the web developers that will at least give you inspiration if not a direct solution.
A colleague of mine has been trying to convince me all week that Dreamweaver, 5 years after I was last forced to use it at gunpoint, is actually now worthwhile for knocking up a design quickly and painlessly, and is also now competent at producing the HTML for that design.
I refuse to invest the 10 minutes it would take to find out based on my previous experiences of it, but you might like to give the demo a quick run around the block :)
I'd recommend finding a CMS package, since you're using Django, look into django-cms. It has TinyMCE and Markdown Support so updating your pages should be easy. Also django-cms integrates well with the Django admin interface.
A piece of paper to sketch your design
A text editor (preferably set up to save directly to a development server local or otherwise) to write up the initial HTML/CSS
FireBug/IEDeveloperToolbar to inspect each element that looks wrong and edit its CSS directly in the browser until it looks fine, followed by commits with the text editor
If you're doing any JavaScript development, use an advanced editor that highlights errors and warnings as you type. This kind of functionality has until recently been the province of static language editors only, but the free NetBeans 6 achieves this amazing feat. Traditionally, you first discovered JavaScript typos and simple bugs when first loading the parent page into a browser. The speed-up you get from being able to short-cut these iterations is profound.
NetBeans 6 also highlights CSS errors and is a more than capable editor for most all languages a web developer is likely to use these days.
You can also use www.zbugs.com - it will help you speed up a process of compressing and gzipping your CSS and Javascript files
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We've used the no-longer-supported RichTextBox control as part of our (ASP.NET-based) CMS for a long time, and we'd like to replace it with something lighter-weight and with better cross-browser support. We were originally looking at various ASP.NET components, but I'm wondering if we'd be better off just using an open-source, all-Javascript solution instead.
I'm a recent convert to jQuery, and I've been amazed at what can be done purely on the client side with very compact add-ons like Flexigrid and of course the excellent WMD. I've done a little poking around for all-Javascript editors, and this is what I've found so far:
Batiste jQueryEditor
Xinha
YUI Rich Text Editor
Tiny MCE
FCKeditor
After a superficial review, Tiny MCE looks like a good choice; but I'd be interested in hearing from people in the SO community who have actually used these. Let me know what you think.
I've used TinyMCE. Great across browsers; easy to configure to be extremely light weight and allows you to control what your user can do. Some of the plug-ins (such as the image manager) are great and easy to implement. Nice that it also support the Google Spellchecker so you don't need any libraries installed on your server.
I've used TinyMCE and I must say I'm not a fan. The main issue with it is that when new versions are released, the API can change drastically, making it very difficult to manage upgrades. There seems to be little regard for backwards compatibility.
The YUI editor is quite nice, and really easy to use. It's still beta as far as I know, so I'm not sure I would necessarily recommend it in a production environment.
FCK is a nice editor, and it has ASP.NET support.
I've used FCKeditor, it's a good editor. Pretty easy to use. The newer versions have very good cross browser support.
It's been mentioned, but the memories of that year lost to RadEditor still haunts me.
On the bright side, they have an incredibly vigilant, and apparently numerous support-staff;
so whenever you need to find that little whatnot that's causing that particular day's RadBugs;
you know you can always have them brew up some custom and obscure mini-fix.
After one year of tangoing with that beast, I had to retreat to pastoral C64 GOTO adventures to preserve my sanity...
Alas, we all need our WYSIWYG editors from time to time, and after trying out both (F)CKeditor and TinyMCE in .NET settings, I am humbled by both.
Would choose TinyMCE at gunpoint though...
I was looking for a good editor too last week, tried WMD but is just not easily customized enough compared to markItUp. It's so easy to extend and customize markItUp, function-wise and theme-wise.
OpenWYSIWYG was on my list too but after trying markItUp I got stuck with it. Plus OpenWYSIWYG is not jQuery, it's JavaScript, but open-source and cross-browser.
WebKit.org has a demo of a very nice/subtle text editor, but i don't know if it works in IE at all (It does work in WebKit based browsers (obviously) and Firefox)
I can't tell if you're specifically looking for a free/open-source solution or not. Others have mentioned many great open-source editors.
If you're willing to look at commercial solutions, Telerik offers the RadEditor. It is highly integrated with ASP.NET and supports all the major browsers.
Event if you will have a lot of connection bandwidth and patience :)
Actually, Telerik is an ASP.NET product and it require asp.net ajax frameworks for runtime and it need to ajax scriptmananer on the running page.
In my opinion, Telerik not good example for this subject.
i'm currently looking for the same kind of editor - lightweight, jQuery and with ASP.Net support. i've came accross Batiste Bieler's jQuery Lightweight Rich Text Editor which seems very simple, nice, pure jQuery lightweight editor.
and there is interpid studios variation that states to be ASP.Net compatible and based on the original above mentioned library (although, doesn't explain what is the thing with being ASP.Net compatible and what doesn't make the original compatible with it too...)
i haven't tried any of those yet, but it seems that i will in the next several days, because i'm looking to replace FCK Editor because it has some quirks and strange behavior to my app users. so i might update this post with my own experience with this/these editor(s).
If someone tried those already, please comment to let others know what do you feel about this.