Using FCKEditor in Ajax views on Zope 3

Javascript, zope3, cookbook, AJAX

I'm working on a new, AJAX based application for a friend, which will run under Zope 3. Being a rather "CMS-ish" type of application, I need to provide an easy way to edit some rich text fields. I've settled on the FCKEditor, for which there is an already packaged library as zope.html (also depends on zope.file). I would have used TinyMCE, but I hit on a problem: all these visual editors have difficulties when loaded in "dynamic loaded views".

• When using FCKEditor, everything seemed be fine for the first time, but the second time the editor was loaded, after the form was reloaded, there would be an error about a missing JavaScript object and the editor would fail to load. Form submission is handled by a function that serializes the form and makes an Ajax call, but the form object only contains the old values, not the new ones, as modified by the visual editor, so this had to be solved as well.
  
• I love TinyMCE for being able to scale down in terms of interface very easily, but I couldn't make it work in my scenario just as easily, so I gave up. The editor would load just fine, but when submitting the form, the entire web page would be replaced by a white page and would continue to keep loading, without any results. I've found some mentioning of this problem on the web, and even in the TinyMCE wiki, but I couldn't work out what needs to be done in the short time that I had.

To solve the FCKEditor problems I had to do the following (blessed be the other bloggers of the Internet which already had to deal with this problem):

• For the first problem, I've inserted the following snippet in the form header:

<script type="text/javascript">
FCKeditorAPI = null;
__FCKeditorNS = null;
FCKTools = null;
</script>

• For the second problem, the form submit handler, I have the following code:

if (FCKeditorAPI) {
       for (instance in FCKeditorAPI.__Instances) {
           field_name = instance.toString();
           field_value = FCKeditorAPI.GetInstance(field_name).GetXHTML();
           sub_form[field_name].value = field_value;
       }
   }

While searching the net for other editors that might not have this problem, I've found this page that contains a big listing of all types of HTML visual editors. To tell the truth, in my use case, I'd be happy with something like Epoz (and I even have checked it on the web), but the project seems dead and I think I would have had to strip the zope/plone integration out of it.

After more then 6 or 7 years of not having to deal with JavaScript I'm very very rusty. Even for the most simple questions - like: how do you get the properties of an object? how do you check if an object has a property? how do you check if an object exists - I had to look at references. But it's all part of the learning experience, which fortunately, is the part that I enjoy most.