Bold, Underline Text, in textbox

[Brett]

Is there a way to have a textbox with underline/bold to different parts the text?

Like this:

Please NOTE: This is a test

Thanks,

Brett

[Steve]

Hello Brett,

Unfortunately we do not have RichTextBox implemented yet, which would allow for the functionality you request. However this is in our TODO list and will be included in subsequent release of our Reporting product.

Please excuse us for the temporary inconvenience.

Regards,
Steve
the Telerik team

Instantly find answers to your questions at the new Telerik Support Center

[Brett]

Do you know how far down on the TODO list it is? The functionality would be really nice to have. I'm working on a report and it's working out great, just the few odds and ends with the RechTextBox would be really nice to have to give a nice polished look to the customer.

Thanks,

Brett

[Steve]

Hello Brett,

We cannot say for certain an exact release date, but it will not be for Q2 as we've already have our hands full with tasks. One thing that separates us from the other companies is that we always listen to our customers. That's why I suggest to leave this forum open for comments from the community and see how big the interest for rich textbox is. The more clients request this functionality, the bigger the chance we move it forward in our TODO list and implement it for .. let's say Q3 this year.

What do you say guys? How big plus is RichTextBox availability for your reports and to what extend do you believe we should implement it. Should we have basic formatting capabilities only at first (standard richtextbox) or should we dive into exploring richtextbox handling html, so that can be used in all reporting formats?
Your comments are invaluable!

Greetings,
Steve
the Telerik team

Instantly find answers to your questions at the new Telerik Support Center

[Nenad]

Hi people, and my answer is YES... rich textbox is MUSTHAVE. However, let me tell you our story so you can understand why it is so important. We are pension insurance company and we send to our customers every 2 weeks some reports or information ... every time more then 5000 reports. We grab a lot of information from our database, but there are a lot of other let us say static text that changes frequently. We call that template. Telerik Reporting is reliable and fast, it generates more then 5000 pages in less then 2 seconds but result does not look nice because all text is left aligned. We would also like to emphasize (make some words more visible or readable) some important data in letter with making the text bold or adding color to it. You can't always present your data in tables; for some purposes tables are fine but for others, regular text with injected data from database is better. It depends on audience to which you will present your report.

So this is one vote plus for RICHTEXTBOX. Looking forward to meet this in next release.

Regards,
Nenad

[Juzzer]

+1

[YodaKIRI]

+1 +1 +1 +1 +1 !

[Wayne Brantley]

A MUST have.  Also, MUST have a 'merge' feature where we can put stuff like [SomeMoneyField!C] which will replace that with the contents of the field and format it as money....

[Ian Blackburn]

+1

[Gavin Howlett-Foster]

This gets my vote too and also being able to convert html. I'd like to be able to take the content of a RadEditor control and use it in a report so I can take advantage of headers and footers, page-breaks etc. that is not easy when printing via html.

[Dean Rosenhain]

I'd like to throw my vote behind this feature as well - it is the #1 requirement for the reporting section of an application we are in the middle of developing.

[Richard]

html functionality would be awesome in a text box.

[Sean]

I would love (and my clients more importantly) the ability to have a rich textbox too and the ability to use HTML would be the ultimate, it doesn't have to support all the HTML tags but at the very least the basics enough to format, like bold underline etc.

[Doug Odegaard]

Agreed that this is a must have feature.  I was just searching the forums as I have the same issue today.  To combine the basic RadEditor aspects like bold, underline and italic into it would be awesome.  Even to be able to encapsulate the needed text with expressions like <strong> when setting the Value property would be just fine.  No need to have the designer GUI extra fancy....just the ability to add this formatting and have it interpreted is wonderful.  Thanks.

Look at Crystal Reports for their functionality....again...no need for designer to be as extensive but even an enhanced Value property box that I would assume is under Telerik control to apply formatting would be awesome.

[Pierre Alain]

Yes, this is a must have.

Thank you

[jonnyO]

Diving into Telerik Reporting for the first time I love the familiarity and ease of use.  My project generates a very dynamic multi-page "pamphlet".  Because of the dynamic formatting the ability to use RadEditor and generate html friendly report/export files would be a extremely significant functionality. 

[Vassil Petev]

Hi guys,

Thank you very much for the input - your feedback is very good and we now have a clear idea of what you are after.

Initially we will release basic rich text formatting options while creating the reports. Later on (eventually end of next year) we may offer HTML support and RadEditor interoperability.

Your comments are welcome.

Regards,
Vassil
the Telerik team

Check out Telerik Trainer, the state of the art learning tool for Telerik products.

[Nenad]

Oh yes, oh yes and again oh yes!!!! Vasil, I'm very glad (as others too, I hope) to hear that wonderfull news. You're right. Simple rich text support is very good starting point. Later on, you can extend features with more powerfulf tools. I can't wait to read on TelerikWatch what's new in Q3 :)
Keep up good working.
Regards, Nenad

[Alan Grimme]

In some cases, though monotonous, I use a separate textbox for each word and just place them close together.  So, "Please NOTE: This is a test" would use 4 text boxes.  One for "Please ", one for "NOTE:  ", one for "This"  and finally one for " is a test".

(Forgive my spacing issue.  I don't know why it's rendering this way.)

[Nenad]

I just read Reporting roadmap for upcomming Q3 2008 release and I can't see enything about basic rich text formatting options mentioned by Vassil in his last post. Is it ommited from roadmap anouncement or ommited entirely from the Q3 release?

[Steve]

Hi Nenad,

There is no promise for rich textbox in my colleagues last post. Our developers have started working on it, but we would not be able to deliver it for Q3. Again we do not want to engage with a specific timeframe as we work in dynamic environment and priorities change all the time.

Thank you for the patience guys!

Greetings,
Steve
the Telerik team

Check out Telerik Trainer, the state of the art learning tool for Telerik products.

[Daniel]

I think this is a must have, especially if you want to stay competitive with Crystal Reports and others.  Currently, we're having to place multiple textboxes on a form in order to get the proper format appearance.  Being able to handle a HTML data item and preserve its' appearance is also a necessity.

Thanks - the sooner we can get this the better.

[Angela Copple]

The lack of this feature was the deciding factor against using Telerik Reporting in our latest project. Instead we resorted to Crystal Reports which has poor HTML support, but it was deemed better than nothing at all.

We've been watching this product with great interest but until there is even basic support for HTML formatting, it will continue to be a no-dice situation for us.

John

[Felipe Balarin]

We are building a new web application for a School and it is full telerik radcontrols for ASP.NET AJAX. The only object that is not a telerik control is the asp:radionbuttonlist . We need to print the student "contract" and in it is very important to bold some words. This feature in the telerik reporting is really a must have. While we wait the release of the telerik reporting with this feature, does anybody knows if there is any workaround for this?

[Greg]

we very much need a rich text textbox to use telerik reporting at all...  Is there any clearer idea of a time line yet?

[Steve]

Hi Greg,

There would be richtextbox introduced for the Q1 2009 release scheduled for the end of February. Keep your fingers crossed for a flawless release :)

Best wishes,
Steve
the Telerik team

Check out Telerik Trainer, the state of the art learning tool for Telerik products.

[SethSpearman]

Bottom line...this is a must have feature for the WinForms product I am developing.  I would love it to suport HTML and RTF but at least one of them would be great.

Until this feature is implemented I will be looking at one of your competitors.  (Hate to do it...I LOVE telerik stuff...it is the only component provider I have purchased.  Maybe you can get it out before I release my product mid-March.)

Just my 2¢.

Happy Customer

[Steve]

Hi SethSpearman,

As noted in my previous reply, we are working on rich textbox for the Q1 release expected at the end of February, which is before mid March.

Sincerely yours,
Steve
the Telerik team

Check out Telerik Trainer, the state of the art learning tool for Telerik products.

[rh]

Steve, that is great news that an RTF editor is coming. I'm in deparate need of it myself. I hope the programming is coming along well and there aren't any snags as I'm going to tell my customers it is coming and we will be able to support their needs soon. No pressure or nothing. :)

[rh]

Is the RTF editor going to allow paragraph line spacing? Such as specifying 1.5X or 2X for line spacing? This is for letter style reports where 1X line spacing doesn't look good - the lines in the paragraph are too close together. Right now I have to have one textbox for each sentence in the letter to create this affect. Total pain to initially create and a total maintenance nightmare.

[Steve]

Hello rh,

There would be no linespacing at least for the first draft of the rich textbox which would have a pretty basic html handling. However we would consider adding it for one of the subsequent versions depending on how things come along of course :)

Best wishes,
Steve
the Telerik team

Check out Telerik Trainer, the state of the art learning tool for Telerik products.

[Wayne Brantley]

Warning, I believe current feature implementation has COMPLETELY MISSED THE MARK!!

I thought this entire thread was about the addition of a RICHTEXTBOX?
That _should_ mean a text box that you can put RTF (rich text format) text into.   Such as text from Word and every other such program.

This way, I can have some custom formatted and controlled by end user text on the report - they can make it in wordpad or anything.  To implement this, you just need to render the rich text out onto the report.

I know Developers Express has this feature, cannot say about the others.

Instead you have built a very limited HTML viewer.   I am sure that will be useful in some scenarios, but due to it's limiations not sure what those are....after all, if I have to make the HTML, I might as well make the report.

Cannot believe I have waited 9 months on 'Rich Text Support' to be given 'Limited HTML rendering'......

[Svetoslav]

Hi guys,

We have been discussing the text formatting features of Telerik Reporting for a while now. We have used different names and terms that might sound misleading or inconsistent. In order to eliminate any further misunderstanding let me elaborate a bit more on what exactly we are working on.

Currently, in order to display a text content one should use the TextBox report item. It renders plain text formatted according to the item's Style. This means that the entire TextBox content is rendered in one color, with the same font and size. Although this functionality covers the basic reporting needs we need, it does have some limitations that make the process of designing reports cumbersome. So, we decided to move one step further and style not only the entire item, but different parts of the content.

The new report item we are developing will allow formatting of different parts of the contained text with different styles. This includes the basic formatting: background and fore color, text align, font name, size and style, plus organizing the text in paragraphs and lists. In order to keep the formatting information with the text (that is - "rich text") we need to use some kind of meta language. There are several document markup languages that are suitable for this task. To name some of them: HTML, XHTML, RTF, TeX, LaTeX, etc. Of course we have the freedom to use our own internal representation/format. Although they all use different syntax, the output that the end user sees is usually the same.

After examining the different possibilities, the capabilities of the supported output formats, and the feedback from our customers (Thank you!) we decided to stick to HTML (to be more specific, we will support a subset of the HTML elements that are suitable for formatting the text). Not to mention that Telerik is well known on the market by its award winning WYSIWYG HTML editor - RadEditor.

The new item, called HtmlTextBox, can render XHTML content, and will support the following HTML elements: STRONG, B, EM, I, U, DIV, SPAN, P, FONT, CENTER, UL, OL, LI, BR; it will also support these CSS styles: background color, font (family, size, weight, style), border (color/style/width), text align and color. We decided to start with a limited set of HTML/CSS elements; if things go well we will extend the HTML capabilities of the HtmlTextBox.

Our primary goal was to enable rich formatting of the report content - not to develop a HTML rendering engine/viewer/browser. The HTML/CSS subset we will support is just for this case. Moreover Telerik Reporting supports a number of different export formats. Some of them have limited rendering capabilities (for ex. MS Excel) that could hardly be passed by.

The new HtmlTextBox report item has one more feature - it supports merging fields - a functionality similar to the MS Word's mail merge, but extended with the Telerik Reporting's built-in expressions.

The new rich text features will be available no later than the 2009.1 release scheduled for March 10. Then all of you will have the chance to play with them and give your feedback. It is our believe that the HtmlTextBox will be powerful enough for your richtext formatting needs.

Regards,
Svetoslav
the Telerik team

Instantly find answers to your questions on the new Telerik Support Portal.
Check out the tips for optimizing your support resource searches.

[Doug Odegaard]

Thanks to the team for this addition.  I'm excited to see its functionality and assure it can surpass what Crystal can do for us.

[rh]

From a testing standpoint I would recommend the following. Create content in your own editor that utilizes all of the supported elements mentioned in your post. For instance, change the font color in your editor and then show the generated HTML from your editor in the new report control to make sure it shows. I personally plan on letting people customize sections of their reports and plan to use your editor as the tool to let them customize that text. So my expecation would be that the two support each other.

On that note it would be great if you offered a built in toolbar mode for the editor that supported only the features supported by the report control because I'll need to limit what the user can do in their customization to what will be supported by the report control. Sure, I can create the tools file myself, but I would suspect that other folks would want this as well so it may make sense to include it in the product.

Finally, please make sure the documentation clearly states what tags and CSS attributes are supported.

Thanks for including this as a step 1. I'm hopeful that you will support full HTML/CSS capabilities in the future.

[Ricardo Pinto]

Hello!

I totally agree with rh: the RadEditor should definitely have a default toolbar mode displaying only the options supported by the HtmlTextBox report item.

As rh said, we can create our custom toolbar, and that's what I did for now:

<Tools>
  <telerik:EditorToolGroup>
  <telerik:EditorTool Name="Cut" />
  <telerik:EditorTool Name="Copy" />
  <telerik:EditorTool Name="Paste" />
  <telerik:EditorTool Name="Undo" />
  <telerik:EditorTool Name="Redo" />
  <telerik:EditorTool Name="FontName" />
  <telerik:EditorTool Name="FontSize" />
  <telerik:EditorTool Name="Bold" />
  <telerik:EditorTool Name="Italic" />
  <telerik:EditorTool Name="Underline" />
  <telerik:EditorTool Name="ForeColor" />
  <telerik:EditorTool Name="BackColor" />
  <telerik:EditorTool Name="JustifyLeft" />
  <telerik:EditorTool Name="JustifyCenter" />
  <telerik:EditorTool Name="JustifyRight" />
  <telerik:EditorTool Name="InsertUnorderedList" />
  <telerik:EditorTool Name="InsertOrderedList" />
  <telerik:EditorTool Name="InsertParagraph" />
  </telerik:EditorToolGroup>
</Tools>

But if you continue to add support for new html/css tags we'll have to update our radEditor(s) everytime.
So I give my +1 to this suggestion :)

Keep up the great work!
Best regards,

Ricardo.

[Ladislav]

I am in such a need for rich TextBox now... I am not sure how to solve it... It is useless to create big description text boxes with no rich text features. Nobody will read it.
That feature would also allow creation of more nice GUIs. 
Please implement that.
Thanks

[Nasko]

Hello Ladislav,

You can use the HtmlTextBox report item to add rich text features to the report's text boxes.

Regards,
Nasko
Telerik

 

 

[Ladislav]

Thanks, that helps.