HtmlTextBox: Increase tag support

ADMIN

Nasko

Posted on: 16 Jul 2020 11:59

Hi Elisa,

I posted a reply to your question in this feature request. I will quote it here as well:

"We are discussing this request when planning the roadmap. It is not included in a published roadmap yet, but given the demand, we will not decline the request either. I cannot provide a particular time frame when this will make it in the roadmap, but I can assure you that it will be brought up again to the attention of the product management to re-evaluate its priority."

I'd like to add that the requested functionality to strip unsupported tags also seems very reasonable, in addition to the increased tag support. We are considering that as well.

Regards,
Nasko
Progress Telerik

Elisa

Posted on: 09 Jul 2020 13:34

The feasible approach in this case would be to integrate the DPL functionality but for partial documents output. This implementation requires significant investment which we cannot apply soon having in mind the rest of the functionality in our plans.

Are you still considering this? I don't see it as an option to vote for on the Q3 2020 Roadmap.

ADMIN

Milen | Product Manager @DX

Posted on: 19 Jul 2019 09:20

Hi Simon,

Thank you for giving the great reasoning behind the request. It makes sense and we realize that such functionality would be beneficial, and certainly understand that the lack of the feature can be frustrating.

We strive to be honest with our clients and only give promises we intend to keep. That is not to say we always succeed, but they reflect our best intent. The feasible approach in this case would be to integrate the DPL functionality but for partial documents output. This implementation requires significant investment which we cannot apply soon having in mind the rest of the functionality in our plans. That is why I cannot provide a particular time frame when this will make it in the roadmap, but I can assure you that we will consider your reasoning.

Once again, thank you for your input.

Regards,
Milen
Progress Telerik

Simon

Posted on: 17 Jul 2019 21:50

Hi guys,

The workaround using a PictureBox showing a raster image is an awful solution. It will render horribly to a vector document such as a PDF.

Adding a table using HTML in order to export it to various formats would be an auxiliary capability of a reporting tool.

Actually, having the ability to use HTML table tags would add fantastic extended functionality to a reporting tool. Complex reports with items containing mini sub-reports (per-item) would be so much easier to write because you have the ability to write simple HTML strings to insert into a column without the additional processing of a sub-report for each row. It takes it to another level.

The ability to add an HTML image is ridiculously obvious. Hasn't this already been offered by competitors a long time ago?

Supporting the ordered list styling to cater for legal terminology is an obvious requirement. Why has this been ignored?

Then again, this feature request is over 4 years old and still under review. It's concerning.

Why offer the HtmlTextBox if you are not prepared to fully support it? It's powerful, but incomplete. Sure, users will continue to request support for more HTML tags and CSS styles, but the obvious line to draw is the basic HTML2.0 specification (from 1995).

No support for TABLE or IMG tags. Really???

Eli

Posted on: 27 Nov 2018 13:23

Thank you Milen, I understand where Telerik is coming from and my options.

ADMIN

Milen | Product Manager @DX

Posted on: 27 Nov 2018 12:22

Hi Eli,

Thanks for your input!
When we introduced the HtmlTextBox we had to choose a markup format supporting rich text. Basically the options we considered were HTML and RTF. We chose HTML as more recent and convenient for eventual manual editing so that clients can more easily grasp where to put embedded expressions, etc. We named it Html... after the markup and ...TextBox denoting the original TextBox item exactly because its purpose is to show text. If we could name it now, we would probably go with RichTextBox, even if it uses the HTML markup inside. This would avoid some confusion. It is not a good idea to rename it now as this will lead to breaking changes and more confusion.

I can ensure you that markup tags, attributes and style properties that are not supported get ignored by the item logic when the final output gets generated, without showing any errors to the end-user. The input, however, should be well formed XML as the currently used XML parser requires that. We can try substituting the parser with one that supports missing closing tags and check if this will bring significant performance penalty. Please log this as a separate feature request.

Telerik Reporting has a table item that binds to data and gets exported to all supported formats. Adding a table using HTML in order to export it to various formats would be an auxiliary capability of a reporting tool. These feature requests continue to be open, because they are necessary to significant number of clients even if we do not see them fit in the product focus. In future we could attempt to reuse or apply the DPL product into this or other dedicated item, but for now we cannot give any certainty or time frame.

The workaround is well known. It is to use a PictureBox showing a raster image of the desired markup: https://www.telerik.com/support/kb/reporting/details/how-to-render-any-html-tags-in-reports

Regards,
Milen
Progress Telerik

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Eli

Posted on: 20 Nov 2018 13:29

If it is not the goal for the HtmlTextBox to display HTML, it should be renamed in order to avoid this confusion in the future. for the most part ignoring unsupported tags would have been acceptable in my use case as well, I just cant have errors displaying on the screen for an unsupported or unclosed tag.

This thread and the request for Table support are two of the most requested features on the portal, but if this is truly outside the scope of Telerik reporting and a closed matter we will begin looking to see if another product may better support our needs. Thank you.

ADMIN

Milen | Product Manager @DX

Posted on: 20 Nov 2018 07:06

Hi all,

Thanks for the new input in this request!

Telerik Reporting introduced back then the HtmlTextBox item with the sole purpose of supporting richly formatted text as part of the report. It does not support any version of the full HTML/CSS specification, as this is not the problem that this product solves. It is not a document converter product, and we are happy to have the Document Processing Libraries product in our portfolio to target the document conversion.
Any suggestions for improvements over the rich text handling are considered for implementation based on demand and value brought when compared with other pending features. Html tags and properties for advanced layouts like the table tag, for example, are considered out of scope for the reporting product.

@Simon - Please add your comments and vote in the item ordered list styling Please add blockquote support as a separate feature request. text-indent style property on block items is supported but is not documented in the corresponding help article. We will fix that.

Regards,
Milen
Progress Telerik

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Squall

Posted on: 14 Sep 2018 16:18

I am using the Document Processing Library to export the HTML to PDF and Word. It supports more html tags. https://docs.telerik.com/devtools/document-processing/libraries/radwordsprocessing/formats-and-conversion/html/htmlformatprovider

Simon

Posted on: 13 Sep 2018 02:28

HI,
I think support for ordered lists is critical for this product:

ol.c {list-style-type: upper-roman;}
ol.d {list-style-type: lower-roman;}
ol.d {list-style-type: upper-alpha;}
ol.d {list-style-type: lower-alpha;}

The reason: Some reports list or quote regulations, which use legal terminology. Additionally, it would provide the ability to refer to a section or sub-section in a cascading list.

At the very least, the <blockquote> tag and "text-indent" style should be supported.

Sveinn

Posted on: 18 May 2017 12:28

Hi
I would like to see greater tag support also.
For example:
* header tags (h1, h2 etc)
* table
* img
* many more

The reports must be able to display the content from Kendo.EditorFor control in the Asp.Net MVC suite.

Srividhya

Posted on: 24 Mar 2017 14:39

<table>

Thales

Posted on: 31 Jan 2017 11:53

+1 for the line-height.

aharms

Posted on: 02 Mar 2015 13:29

I would like to see greater tag support as well.  Specifically, I have the requirement for the line-height style.

ADMIN

Iana Tsolova

Posted on: 09 Feb 2015 15:02

Hi Eli,

Thank you for the details and the examples provided so far.

Best,
Iana

Eli

Posted on: 09 Feb 2015 14:41

IMG tag is one (already saw a request under review for that).  Others are any of the weird Word tags.  I wouldn't need it to display them, but if the HtmlTextBox was able to just ignore them that would be nice.  We try to always clean the Word formatting but sometimes something slips through.  This is one example: <u5:p></u5:p> is sometime at the end of copy/pasted emails that end up on a report.  Prior to looking and stripping it out it would cause the HtmlTextBox to error out.  Ignoring it all together (like the RadEditor does) would be best.

The other issue I mentioned has to do with spacing.  For instance the code below shows pic #1 in the radeditor and as pic#2 in the HtmlTextBox display.  Extra spaces are often inserted.  Not sure why.

<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span>Eli Landers</span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span>Line 2</span></p>
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span>Line 3</span></p>

Attached Files:

ADMIN

Iana Tsolova

Posted on: 09 Feb 2015 12:37

Hi,

Can you suggest a few tags, that are most commonly used in your case and not supported for example? 

Thanks,
Iana