changes to EditorDialogs

[Albert Shenker]

I have implemented some custom external Editor Dialogs in my apps which are based on your built-in dialogs. I am wondering what the recommendation is for making sure you haven't made any fixes to the built-in dialogs that need to be addressed in my custom ones. When I look at the changes made in various releases, I don't typically see anything speicifically about the editor dialogs, but surely you must make some changes and bug fixes to these.

Also, it looks like the FileManagerDialogParameters.EnableImageEditor property has been deparacted. Is there no way to enable/disable the image editor in the Image Manager dialog w/o modifying the dialog?

Lastly, it would be nice to be able to hide the file insertion functionality (Insert Button and Properties tab) of the Image Manager in codebehind instead of, again, altering the dialog. I am using the dialog to manage some images (ie not insert them into an editor), so the Insert button and Properties tab should not be show. I can, of course, alter the dialog, but this leads to the fragility issue mentioned above.

[Rumen]

Hi Albert,

Changes to the built-in dialogs of RadEditor are not make some often and currently the only way to see a change is to use some file merging tools like WinMerge and compare the old and new files in the EditorDialogs folder. Our developers are also notified to post information about dialog changes in the released notes of the editor or the file explorer control.


The ImageEditor button can be enabled / disabled through the ImageManager-EnableImageEditor property of RadEditor, e.g.
RadEditor1.ImageManager.EnableImageEditor = true;

As to your feature request: I logged it in our PITS system and our developers will consider its implementation. The constraints are that the dialogs are not part of the current page and this will require addition of extra code on the main page, which will decrease RadEditor and page loading speed. For this reason we provided the ability to customize the dialogs through the external dialog files.
It will be also hard to provide properties for all dialogs features, because every dialog offers different functionality.
 In addition, if we provide properties for hiding the Insert and Cancel buttons in the Image manager but the developer has already customized the dialog through the external dialog file and has already hide these buttons in the HTML markup, then this could generate new problems.

Kind regards,
Rumen
the Telerik team

[Albert Shenker]

1) I think your first paragraph depicts the problem with customizing the built-in dialogs.You may not change them often, but you do change them as would be expected when new functionality is needed or bugs need to be fixed.Even if this only happens every couple of years, it means my code has to be changed every time you make a change, or else my cusotmized dialog may no longer work properly with the rest of your controls. And, this has to be done in every applicatoin I make use of the custom dialogs in.This is the definiton of a fragile implementation 

2) I am not using a RadEditor on my page, so your suggestion about hiding the ImageEditor won't work.

3) Regarding the customizations, I wonder if you guys have ever considered making the ImageManager and/or ImageEditor into discrete controls? Unlike most of the other dialogs, these don't necessarily have anything to do with creating content so their applications range far beyond what one might want to do with Rad Editor. From my point fo view, these controls wouldn't need to be all that customaizable from a layout standpoint. A user would just need to be able to set different skins and hide/show the various elements such as buttons, select options, etc. You've already shown a wilingness to create other more complex compositie controls like RadScheduler. I think ImageManager and ImageEditor standalone controls (obiovusly the second would also be part of the first) would be very useful,

[Rumen]

Hi Albert,

In the latest Q3 2010 version, you can disable the ImageEditor in a standalone image manager using:

DialogDefinition imageManager = new DialogDefinition(typeof(ImageManagerDialog), imageManagerParameters);

//disable Image Editor button
imageManager.Parameters["EnableImageEditor"] = false;

We are also planning to implement a standalone Image Editor control.

Greetings,
Rumen
the Telerik team