Genii Weblog
CoexEdit and importing local images - Bootstrapping a tutorial
Thu 8 Sep 2005, 10:40 AM
Tweetby Ben Langhinrichs
Inserting an image from your local disk drive requires that you have the slight modifications which are present in the version of FCKEditor available from the Genii Software website. The two modified files can also be downloaded from the CoexEdit downloads page if you already have FCKEditor 2.0 FC installed on your system.
This tutorial assumes you have the customizations in place, and have made the changes necessary to your database:
1) Start by create a table using the
and the table created should look like this:
2) Now, place the cursor inside the first table cell and click on the Insert/Edit Image button, which looks like
Look carefully in the upper right corner. If there are two buttons, one of which says Browse Server and the other of which says Browse Local, you have the correct FCKEditor customizations. If you only have a Browse Server button, you do not have the customizations.
3) Click on the Browse Local button. This will bring up another dialog box, which should look like the following, although it may be larger:
4) Click on the Browse... button, and traverse the standard directory structure to find a local image. The dialog should look something like this:
and after selecting an image, the Browse Local Images dialog would contain a path to the image.
5) Click the Upload button from that dialog, which will return you to the Image Properties dialog. Two important things should be noted here. The first is that the URL shown in the Image Properties dialog will not be the local path, but instead will point to an uploaded image in your database. This is a temporary image that will be removed once CoexEdit moves the image into an in-line image. The second thing to note is that the image you uploaded will appear in the preview, but it may take a second or two. It may appear briefly as a broken image before showing as a proper image. This delay is the time the indexer in your database takes to index the image so it can be found. The dialog should look something like this:
6) When the image is showing in the preview (and not before), click on the OK button and the image should appear in the table cell, like that below:
7) Continue adding images to other cells, as well as text and more. These images will all point to temporary image files in your database until your save. When you save, CoexEdit will convert these to in-line images and delete the temporary images.
Copyright © 2005 Genii Software Ltd.
What has been said:
365.1. Doug Cohen (09/08/2005 09:10 AM)
Can you please explain why you need to use the "Insert/Edit Image button" instead of the "Image Button".
I notice that there is an additional tab on the "Insert/Edit Image button" called Link. Is there other functionality differences?
365.2. Ben Langhinrichs (09/08/2005 09:16 AM)
Good question. The answer is that Image Button is for creating a button with active content behind it, which is not really supported. In fact, if you look at my previous blog post Customizing the FCKEditor Toolbar, you will see that there is a whole set of icons (and matching functionality) which should be removed from FCKEditor before it is used with CoexEdit. This includes items like Insert Form, which clearly make no sense in the way CoexEdit is used. You folks should definitely consider using the smaller toolbar, as I think I have communicated via e-mail.
For what it is worth, CoexEdit might be able to handle adding an image buttom, which would then become a hotspot over an image in Notes. but I would recommend against supporting it, as so little of what you do with active content on the web translates well to the Notes client.
365.3. Doug Cohen (09/08/2005 10:15 AM)
Thank you for the clarification. It makes perfect sense now.
We are planning to make use of a custom toolbar, but until you pointed it out, I never really noticed the differences in the functionality image buttons.