#angular-textbox.io

##What does this do?

###tl;dr angular-textbox.io provides an AngularJS Directive that allows the Textbox.io WYSIWYG Rich Text Editor to be part of your <form>.

##Requirements

• AngularJS 1.3 *
• Textbox.io 1.2+

*In its current form it will not work with earlier releases of AngularJS as it uses the $validators pipeline. If you need to use this with earlier releases of AngularJS please contact us at mailto:[email protected].

##Usage Implementing this custom directive is straightforward and simple.

####Add the Textbox.io files to your project Textbox.io itself has a set of files that need to be available in your application in order for the directive to function properly. When you download Textbox.io you need to place the textboxio folder somewhere that is accessible to the user's browser at runtime. You need to make sure you have a <script> tag in your page that loads the textboxio.js JavaScript file. The remainder of this document assumes the Textbox.io files are in a web-accessible location and you already have a <script> tag in place loading the textboxio.js JavaScript file

####Add the files from angular-textbox.io to your project The 3 files provided need to be available to your application. Where you place them is up to you and there seems to be a multitude of "best practices" for how to organize your files in an Angular project. We will not attempt to tell you where to place the files but make sure you load the files in your main html page!

####Add a ephox.textboxio module dependency to your application's module For example, if your main module was called blogApp you would define blogApp in this fashion:

angular.module('blogApp', ['ngRoute', 'ephox.textboxio']);

...where the array defines required modules.

####Add the tbio attribute to a <textarea> in your form. To turn a regular <textarea> into a Textbox.io editor instance you must add the tbio attribute to the <textarea>. The minimum required tag would then look like this:

<textarea tbio ng-model=“your.model.reference” rows=“15” id=“tbioTextArea” name=“tbioTextArea” ></textarea>

Make sure you do not have any space or text between the opening and closing <textarea> tags - doing so will cause issues with loading data into Textbox.io. It will also trigger an automatic failure of the tbio-required validation.

Note: Each <textarea> must have a unique id attribute as that is how the directive locates the <textarea> in the DOM.

####The configuration attribute (optional - but not really optional) The Directive supports the use of a configuration attribute on the <textarea> tag. This allows you to pass a String that the directive will use to find a valid configuration for the editor. If you don’t use this attribute the editor will open with its default configuration (almost never what you really want).

<textarea tbio ng-model=“your.model.reference” configuration=“simple” rows=“15” id=“tbioTextArea” name=“tbioTextArea” ></textarea>

…where simple is a Sting that matches the name of one of the properties defined in the tbioConfigFactory.js file. The sample tbioConfigFactory.js file includes two properties as examples of how this should work. The configuration parameter's value must match the name of a propery created in the tbioConfigFactory.js file.

##Optional Features ####Validation attributes The Directive supports the use of two attributes to handle validation of the “length” of the content in the editor instance. As the “length” of HTML content can be difficult to calculate the directive simply takes the HTML content and…

• Removes all HTML tags
• Removes all HTML entities
• Counts the remaining characters

The three attributes you can add are:

• tbio-required (the editor must have some content)
• tbio-minlength (the editor must have some minimum number of text characters)
• tbio-maxlength (the editor cannot exceed some maximum number of text characters)

Using these would lead to the following <textarea> tag in your form:

<textarea tbio tbio-minlength=“25” tbio-maxlength=“50000” ng-model=“your.model.reference” configuration=“simple” rows=“15” id=“tbioTextArea” name=“tbioTextArea”></textarea>

Note: You can certainly use other standard AngularJS attributes on the <textarea>. We don’t recommend using required, ng-minlength or ng-maxlength as they count HTML tags as characters of content. We suggest you use tbio-required, tbio-minlength and/or tbio-maxlength instead.

####Custom Validation Functions AngularJS 1.3 added a new validation feature - the $validators pipeline. This allows you to easily add custom validation to an ngModel object using a rather simple syntax:

ngModel.$validators.myValidation = function (modelValue, viewValue) {
	//Your code here that returns true (valid) or false (invalid)
}

You can add your own functions to the tbioValidationsFactory.js file and they will be added at runtime to the $validators pipeline. The tbioValidationsFactory.js contains two sample functions so you can see how to setup these functions.

Files Included

In order to implement this you need three custom files:

• tbio.js
• tbioConfigFactory.js
• tbioValidationsFactory.js

In total these files provide a module (textboxio) that contains 3 directives, 2 factories, and 1 controller to manage the implementation of Textbox.io in an AngularJS form.

##The complete details on what this does ####(when tl;dr is not enough!) AngularJS provides a built in two-way data binding between form (view) elements and the underlying (data) model. While this works well for standard form elements, AngularJS does not know how to interact with Textbox.io.

This is primarily due to the fact that Textbox.io “hides” the form field (<textarea>) and superimposes an iFrame over the form field. This means that when you are typing into Textbox.io you are not updating an AngularJS aware view so the underlying model is not updated. When the form is submitted, the content of Textbox.io is not included.

This set of AngularJS Directives and Factories solves this issue by managing the process of...

• Deploying Textbox.io to the page
• Managing the sync of data between Textbox.io and the AngularJS view and model objects
• Allowing for validation of content in the editor
• required (via tbio-required attribute)
• minimum chars of text (via tbio-minlength attribute)
• maximum chars of text (via tbio-maxlength attribute)
• Allowing for developer-defined custom validation functions to be added to the $validators pipeline for all Textbox.io instances