Did Documement manager make it to Q2 for RADBook?

[Ben Hayat]

Did the Document Manager and/or Rich Edit make it to Q2 RADBook to show content in "Flow" format? If yes, any docs or samples/demos please?
Thanks!
..Ben

[Ben Hayat]

Although the "What's New" says "Integration with new RadEditor" but looking at help or sample files or RichEdit, I can't find any info.
Also, it seems like a lot of new properties and classes have been added. Is there an update to the help to take advantage of these new additions?
Thanks!
..Ben

[Mike]

Hi ..Ben,

We made a significant progress with RadDocument/ RadBook integration, however we encountered some major issues that did not let us provide a demo along with Q2 release. However, right now we are trying to find workarounds for the problems. I will let you know when we have results, later this week. Let me know if you need more info.

Sincerely yours,
Mike
the Telerik team

[Ben Hayat]

Mike, thank you very much for candid answer and I wish you luck with your solution. If I can provide any feedback, feel free to contact me directly. Just to give you an overall idea what the needs are.

I had tried to incorporate the RAD book in several projects, but every time I had full discussion with client and their needs, it always comes down to one point that the "understanding" of a book/magazine/newspaper and etc. is that the content is a long content that could span over pages. Just like a Word or PDF document. The structure of the current RADBook, prohibited this since it was designed to tackle data as if each page was the finishing line for each element. In many cases like creating catalogs for items may work fine, but it does not address the true nature of a Book metaphor. So, the reality is that, the foundation of the RAD book may have to change, otherwise you might be trying to fit a square box in a round hole.

Good luck, and if I can be any help, let me know.
..Ben

[Mike]

Hello ..Ben,

Finally we found solutions for most of the problems related to RadRichTextBox/RadBook scenario:



The approach involves several new controls.

RadDocumentBindingSource is used to bind RadBook (or in fact any other Items-Control). It wraps the provided document and raises collection-changed events when content of the document changes and as a result page count changes.

RadDocumentSinglePageEditor is able to display (and partially edit) a single page of a document. This is the control that is added to RadBook page templates. Actually the most heavy lifting is done by RadDocumentSinglePagePresenter that lays inside RadDocumentSinglePageEditor. To identify which page to present, this control requites a PageIndex, which in the case is provided by the items of RadDocumentBindingSource. It also needs a reference to a DocumentViewManager.

DocumentViewManager is a control that aggregates some common data used by all instances of RadDocumentSinglePageEditor that are added to each RadBook page, like the RadDocument instance being presented.

Currently there are still issues in the editing scenario and this is the reason editing is not enabled by default (RadDocumentSinglePageEditor.IsReadonly). Most of these issues should be resolved in the service pack. However editing in this case actually does not provide a good user experience (by design) and this is why our primary goal is to achieve good document viewing experience.

Please consider this demo as a "preview" of this functionality and do not pay great attention to the issues that might come up. Feedback is greatly appreciated though. With the next version (SP1) we will integrate this new classes in Telerik.Windows.Documents assembly. Please note that the names of the classes as well as some of their API may change. Currently this demo should be built using Q2 version of RadControls for Silverlight 4.

I really hope this solution will be useful in many scenarios involving no so standard presentation of documents. I am anxious to know what do you think about this.

Best wishes,
Mike
the Telerik team

[Ben Hayat]

I am anxious to know what do you think about this.
I think the first thing in order, is to congratulate you for perusing it the right way. Although, I'm not deeply knowledgeable in your RichEdit structure, however I was generally thinking of two new things that are needed to do this the right way. A) BindingSource B) And the presenter.
And I feel this approach will work for CoverFlow as well.
I will certainly look into this and give you my two cents;

Few Questions:
a) Is the original behavior of the RADBook modified? Another words, for cases where RADBook will show ItemsList as it did before. Is that still in place?

b) Are these "Additional" controls adds features on the top of RADBook functionality?

c) Is it reasonable to expect the RichEdit and RADBook to work in the following scenario? Suppose I create a page in SL with RichTextEditor where the user (Document author - i.e. Magazine) would go and insert some images, some text, perhaps hyperlinks, GridView or ListView and etc. Then creates a document that might be 20 pages, saves the content (preferably in a database).
Then I write another SL app that uses a RADBook & RichEditor where the user (Consumer) would select which book to look at, and the system will read the content from Database is loaded into RichEditor, and the RichEditor would show the pages in multiple pages of the book in a flow format? Is it even safe to assume that we can offer the capability to increase the zooming and the content will be adjusted accordingly?

d) Are you guys going to identify which controls should be inserted into RichEditor that could be presented properly without issues?

Thank you for the update!

[Ben Hayat]

Just did an important test (at least important from my point of view), and it worked beautifully.

For SP1 demo, could you please demonstrate via a demo program to place the book inside of a "ViewBox" control, in case someone is running in lower resolution or doesn't have the browser fully maximized, the viewbox would shrink the content (RADBook). And then two things could happen.
a) The text and content would stay the same size, however since the content holder has become smaller, then the content would flow to the next page.
b) Or the content would shrink accordingly. And if it does, we need to provide a slider bar to increase the content view size.

Here I created two ScreenShots SS1 and SS2. SS1 shows that MS Word has been shrunken and the content has also been shrunken to 80%. Then in SS2 I used the slider to increase the view size to 110% and you can see the content is now flown accordingly.
So, basically if a book is shrunken due to browser size, and users wants to be able o read, we need to offer to increase the view size and the content should move accordingly. This feature would make the book a true book where it can adjust itself dynamically.

Mike, so far it looks very (and I mean very) nice. At this stage I can live with ReadOnly issue. As long as we get the flow and view sizing right.
I'll do more tests and give you feedback.
Thanks!
..Ben

p.s. How did you insert an image into your post and I don't seem to be able to do it? :-)

[Mike]

Hello ..Ben,

Thank you very much for the feedback!
I'll go through your questions one by one, even though I think you already guessed the answers of some of them.

a) This demo uses Q2 version of all controls, including RadBook and RadRichTextBox. In order to solve some issues in this scenario we will make some enhancements on both controls for SP1.

b) The additional controls actually modify presentation of RadRichTextBox (and RadDocument) to fit it in RadBook.

c) I guess the most common scenario will be just as you think - editing the document in a MS-Work like view then save it, then only show this document in RadBook when needed. Editing in RadBook scenario just feels unnatural- pages should flip back an forth while you enter text and the experience would no be very good. Of course we are open to suggestions and if any customer finds a reasonable editing scenario we will try to help. Another I think good scenario for RadBook would be "Find" or "Select all matches" and navigate through them.

d) I am actually not sure about this one. Can you please elaborate a bit more?

We will definitely take into account the ViewBox integration. I also have in mind the per-page-zoom scenario however this does not seem so trivial and I am not sure we will be able to deliver it for the upcoming SP.

Thank you again for sharing your thoughts. Let me know if you have more questions.

p.s. According to our policy attachments in forum posts are allowed only for Telerik staff. Customers can still attach files/images in tickets of course. However I will bring up the question about allowing attachments to Telerik MVPs if you think this can be useful for you.

Sincerely yours,
Mike
the Telerik team

[Ben Hayat]

d) I am actually not sure about this one. Can you please elaborate a bit more?

Sure! I have posted another detail thread in the RADRichText section under the title of "Best Recommended Content Format to Use". In there, my last question/point was, if we need to create a document editor in SL app using RichText control, for user to create content, what RADControls  or SL controls would you think would be safe for user to use in the RichText control as content? For example, users may want to put Text, Image, Shape (Rectangle, Circle), DataGrid and etc. as content.
This would be the case where we should allow users to create complex content. But truthfully, this can turn into a complex editor, to allow users to create controls, give them property editor and etc. But just a thought.

However I will bring up the question about allowing attachments to Telerik MVPs if you think this can be useful for you.
I'll leave that up to you guys. Either way, I'm fine with it!
..Ben
 

[Mike]

Hi ..Ben,

Thanks for all the suggestions and feedback. For now I will add this complex editing scenario in our long term to-do list for consideration. Hopefully after Q3 we will have more time and customer feedback and we will be able to concentrate on similar features.
Keep us posted if other ideas pop up.

Greetings,
Mike
the Telerik team