What's the best way to escape active-X purgatory with media objects?

morglum666

Well Known Member
What\'s the best way to escape active-X purgatory with media objects?

Hello,

We are currently on 8.12/ 8.98.4.5 with a partially virtual, partially physical Intel / SQL backend. In the new year we plan on upgrading to the latest and greatest version (9.1.X) and one of the re-occuring discussions is how to make JDE possibly more accessible to mobile clients from phones, to tablet, etc.

One of the topics we've had is using something like a citrix for application abstraction, but since we use the CSMS module to upload attachments we're still using the Active-X components. I understand there is a HTML front end for media objects that skips active-X, but I'm not really getting a sense from the documentation if this will help open up our options beyond IE. I also can't tell if there are any funky conversions needed, which I wouldn't really expect given its just a front end.

We are using both kinds of media object uploads including "File| Upload" and "OLE" attachments.

Does anyone have any comments, ideas?

Thanks

Malcolm
 
Re: What\'s the best way to escape active-X purgatory with media objects?

The setting to change this is in the JAS.INI so you can change it in your DV or PY based web instance without affecting Production to get a feel for what the affect will be.
 
Re: What\'s the best way to escape active-X purgatory with media objects?

Malcolm,

unfortunately it's not just a "front-end" switch to eliminate Active-X for media objects. There is a funky conversion needed.

Traditionally Text objects have been stored in Rich Text format.
The HTML front-end stores text in xhtml format.
Document 845387.1 states "At any point user is able to work with only one type of editor, either ActiveX or HTML rich text editor. There are differences in the activeX and ADF HTML editor. Once you switch a file from ActiveX to HTML, there will be a change in the text file format. This is due to font limitations. Once a file is converted to HTML, or created via HTML, it will be read only with ActiveX."
This only applied to individual text objects and once the attachment is converted and saved to the database in XHTML, it cannot be returned to the ActiveX RTF format - even if you change the JAS.ini switch back.

This was a major issue for us because for a long time (until TR 9.1.2?) there was no conversion utility to convert from F00165 text from one format to the other. As we have outside tools that access this content - it needed to be one or the other - not a mix of rich text and xhtml. So we haven't switched (yet). Never-the-less there are powerful forces moving us away from ActiveX / IE only. So at some point this year we'll probably take the plunge now that there is a conversion tool available.
 
Re: What\'s the best way to escape active-X purgatory with media objects?

morglum,

The conversion application is P98MOHTM. It has the following warning:

[ QUOTE ]
Please Note: After the data is converted to HTML format, it cannot be converted back to RTF format.
It is recommended to backup the data in the F00165 table for this data source before executing this conversion.
To view/edit the RTF text in HTML editor after conversion set the ActiveX Contol = false on the JAS server web runtime configuration.

[/ QUOTE ]

Converting to HTML can also have unexpected results:

From: E1: MOBJ: Frequently Asked Questions on Text Media Object Attachments [ID 1353686.1]

[ QUOTE ]
Question 12: Why does a Carriage Return in HTML Media Object Attachments insert an extra line?

Answer 12: When entering text into attachments all carriage returns insert an extra line. This occurs when using HTML media objects NOT Active X Media Objects. The behaviour is the same in Internet Explorer or Firefox.

When pressing Enter on the text editor, although it looks like an extra line is being added, it is actually adding new paragraph <p>. On Internet Explorer, pressing Enter results in the insertion of a new paragraph. To insert a new line, use Shift+Enter. The Shift+Enter key combination inserts a new line consistently on all browsers. Refer to Bug 12973616 for additional details.

[/ QUOTE ]

In addition, when retrieving the attached text using the media objects system function , it does return/insert blank lines after each paragraph.
 
Re: What\'s the best way to escape active-X purgatory with media objects?

Thanks for the detailed response. Ugly, ugly, all of it.
Primarily, we are using a module I think only a handful of users have live (CSMS) and our real plan is to get out of it completely and install a CRM.

Based on what you've said I don't think we'd go through all that and we'll just try to get the data out and into a more friendly system.

Thanks again!

Malcolm
 
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