The Best Rich Text / HTML Editor for Oracle APEX

 One of the first bigger public applications I built in Oracle APEX was the website and backend for a flight school (in 2006). It was a little Content Management System (CMS), so the secretary of the flight school could update the website and the trainers could create their online course material and exams straight from an administration page. I used a Rich Text (HTML) Editor, so they could make some text bold, include pictures, add some color and add tables to the text.

In many other applications, I started to use the Rich Text Editor so people could write their own emails and send them straight from their APEX apps. 

In the last 5 years, I didn't only come across the use of a Rich Text Editor in our own applications, but we saw that many people use it when they use APEX Office Print (AOP) to generate documents. AOP has the unique feature that it understands HTML and converts this to native Word/PDF styling. For example, the bold tag in HTML or the use of a span with a certain style is translated as real bold and, for example, that color in the generated document. People love it as they can make very dynamic documents.

Although we and many others are using the Rich Text Editor in our Oracle APEX apps, there were two things that were hard to do (read not native and you have to write extra code):

• dealing with over 32K of data
• upload, manipulate, and include images in the text 

As part of our Plug-ins Pro offering, we wanted to create the best Rich Text Editor (RTE) possible for Oracle APEX. So, a year ago, Bartosz and I did some research on what would be the best way to address this. We thought about enhancing the current RTE of APEX, but while doing the research we found the component was quite old (based on CKEditor 4 in APEX 20.1 and before). So we looked at many different RTEs, and ended up with our top 3:

• TinyMCE: an open-source editor, with which Bartosz had done a lot of work
• CKEditor: this is what is included in Oracle APEX. Before APEX 20.2 it was CKEditor 4, from 20.2 onwards the default one is CKEditor 5. The new editor is also open-source, looks nice but was still undergoing a lot of changes and enhancements, and wasn't backward compatible.
• Froala: used a lot by AOP customers, I have always been impressed by their offering, but it's paid.

They are all good, and although we needed to pay to use this editor in an APEX Plug-in and have the rights to distribute it without people needing to have their own license, we went with the Froala WYSIWYG Editor. 

And, I couldn't be happier with what Bartosz came up with and how easy it is now to use the RTE Editor.

Here's an animated gif to give you an idea of how it looks:

o implement a plug-in in your own app, you can follow this step-by-step guide, which will cover how to download the Oracle APEX plug-ins from the Plug-ins Pro website and import and register the plug-in.

In short, the steps to use the Rich Text Editor Pro plug-in in your own app are:

1. Login, download, and unzip the Rich Text Editor Pro plug-in from plug-ins-pro.com
2. Upload and run from SQL Workshop > SQL Scripts > ddl_unitedcodes_rich_text_editor_pro.sql and  ddl_unitedcodes_rich_text_editor_pro_sample_rest.sql
3. Import the Plug-ins in your app (the RTE Editor exists out of 3 plug-ins): Shared Components > Plug-ins > Import: dynamic_action_plugin_unitedcodes_froala_rte_da_conf.sql and item_type_plugin_unitedcodes_froala_rte.sql and process_type_plugin_unitedcodes_froala_rte_process.sql