Importing/Exporting HTML

This requires version 5.1.5 of the Liquid Controls Library, you can download the dll for free from the Downloads link above.

The Rich TextBox control contains a HTML property for importing/exporting, converting from HTML to RichText where the HTML provided was originally generated from RichText will give perfect results.  HTML that has either been modified from a previous conversion or is completely new cannot be guaranteed to convert, certainly a source dump of a web page will not work.

Converting from RichText to HTML

The online RichTextBox example can be used to test exporting HTML, in the screenshot below we export a snippet of RichText consisting of one heading and a line of text.

Converting from HTML to RichText

The basic requirements for converting a block of HTML to RichText is as follows:

• All tags are well formed.

• Your CSS styles are included in the same HTML file and not separate CSS files.

• The CSS is contained within the <style> tag.

• The HTML follows directly after the styles.

Ensuring the HTML is well formed is very important as it is parsed by an XML reader and HTML with missing or incorrectly closed tags will result in exceptions.  An example of a simple HTML document that could be imported would be:

The online RichTextBox example can be used to test importing HTML.

As you can see if you attempt to import the above into the RichTextBox using our online example you will notice the text with the class contains the correct styling after importation, however the text with the inline style is rendered without any bold styling.  It is also important to note that only a few CSS style commands and possible values are accepted during the conversion, these are as follows:

• font-family:Any Silverlight Font

• font-size:Npx

• text-align:left|center|right

• color:#RGB

• font-weight:bold

• text-decoration:underline

• font-style:Italic

• vertical-align:Sub|Super

There are lots of possibilities for using the RichTextBox in HTML editing scenarios and it won't be long before we start seeing Silverlight powered forums and CMS systems.