SDL Tridion 2011 Paste Special Function

Question

The paste special function in SDL Tridion 2011 doesn't work in any current web browsers. Is anyone aware if this issue will be addressed in Tridion 2013? It was a real time-saver when it was functional, and prevented a lot of reformatting that's now unavoidable when pasting from Microsoft Word or any similar programs.

Seasonseasonable

When did you last see this working? – Hackney

Answer 1

People are frequently landing on this page, just want to let know, there is an extension available on Community now.

http://www.sdltridionworld.com/community/2011_extensions/pastespecial.aspx

Ramshackle

Answer 2

Mark - For me this does work i've just looked with both IE7 and FF18. In IE the focus of the paste special pop-up dialog sometimes is never to the front, so I sometimes have to minimise the SDL Tridion edit window to find it.

Perhaps you could provide some additional information about the browsers and errors you receive?

Also fyi the supported browsers from the official SDL documentation shows:

Web browser Supported:

Internet Explorer 9.0 Safari 5.1 for the Mac Google Chrome, latest version Mozilla Firefox, latest version

Perfectible

The supported web browser list has to be somewhat taken with a grain of salt and not because of anything that is Tridion's fault but rather due to the rapid release cycle of Chrome and Firefox. Every once in a while they introduce changes that just break things that worked before. Add in Chrome and Firefox's auto-update 'feature' and this can lead to the occasional challenging day like when FF17 was released in November and it didn't play well with Tridion. – Neurocoele

@john is there any specific setting to do for "paste special" in IE-9. Only paste as text works for me. other options just paste nothing and RTF field remains blank. – Ramshackle

Answer 3

Paste Special works properly for us in Internet Explorer but not in Chrome or Firefox.

With the 2011 upgrade we’ve been pushing users toward Google Chrome because it is so much faster than IE or Firefox and paste special not working properly in Chrome has turned into one of the biggest usability issues our editors and producers are having with Tridion 2011 (not surprisingly they like to write primarily in msword.) We'veraised the issue of Paste Special not working iwht Chrom with Tridion support back in November and received two conflicting responses from them.

In both cases Tridion acknowledged knowing about the issue and in both cases they stated they would not fix the issue in Tridion 2011. The place the difference comes in is that in the first response we received from them they said they would be fixing the issue in Tridion 2013 and in the second response we received they said they had no plans on fixing the issue.

We did look into what was going on with the code to see if it was something we could fix by hacking the UI and what we found for Chrome was the following snippet which enables/disables the paste buttons:

if ($dom.isWebkit) // couldn't get it to work in Chrome
{
    delete allowedActions["Paste"];
}

So basically it would seem like Tridion tried but gave up on implementing Paste Special in Chrome Likewise in Firefox the buttons are enabled but when you try to paste special, nothing happens. Our development manager debugged and it turned out the paste method is throwing a silent exception -> NS_ERROR_DOM_XPCONNECT_ACCESS_DENIED in the following code when executing lDocument.execCommand:

var lPasteFailed = false; 
try 
{ 
pastingWithFlag = iProcessingFlag; 
if (lPasteFailed = (!lDocument.execCommand("paste", false, null) || lDocument.body.innerHTML == "")) 
{ 
throw Error("paste had no result - possibly clipboard data unaccessible"); 
} 
if (pastingWithFlag == undefined) 
{ 
lPasteFailed = true; // in certain cases lDocument.execCommand("paste"...) will cause paste into the main area in IE, which will be handled in the onpaste event handler ->     do not paste again 
} 
} 
catch (err) 
{ 
$fa.canAccessClipboard = false; 
lPasteFailed = true; 
self.fireEvent("warning", { source: "paste()", message: err.message }); 
} 

We are getting a lot of internal pressure to get this issue resolved so we’re going to be re-opening the issue with Tridion support and I am planning on getting in touch with my account rep sometime in the next couple days to raise this as a critical issue with him as well.

Neurocoele

Neither Chrome nor Firefox allow any access to the clipboard from JavaScript. Firefox used to let you overwrite it through some complicated configuration settings, but those apparently don't work anymore either. Alternatives require you to paste it manually using the keyboard and then having the editors try to redirect the input and do some magic to respond to the event. But there are all kinds of issues with that too. I guess what I'm saying is that we at SDL have not given up on finding a solution, but it's far from trivial and it's unlikely to be small enough to be hot-fixed. – Predetermine

@Peter not saying this would be easy but didn't Chrome gain the capability to access the clipboard via extensions back around version 13 or 14? I know it still isn't straightforward given the hoops google makes you jump through to actually get to the data but it seems like they have at least made some sort of mechanism available for programatic clipboard access. – Neurocoele

You could always access the clipboard in extensions. What they did was remove the ability to do it normally and then say "write a browser extension" as the replacement. Not exactly ideal, especially considering that most customers would not want to install a browser extension just for Paste functionality. But yeah, it's one of the available options. – Predetermine

Answer 4

We re-opened this issue with SDL and here is their response with regards to where/when Paste Special should work in Tridion:

• IE: supported and works. Any issues can be reported and we will look into fixing it.
• Chrome: not supported (Chrome does not give access to clipboard)
• Firefox: There are steps here to enable clipboard access (http://sdllivecontent.sdl.com/LiveContent/content/en-US/SDL_Tridion_2011_SPONE/task_RECON43B1609144D94562A394BB51FAC884B9), although we have seen evidence of Firefox closing off clipboard access similar to Chrome

Building an extension to enable paste special is outside of R&D current scope.

On February 13, 2013 SDL will be announcing a contest during the community webinar (http://webinars.julianwraith.com/).

The contest will challenge the community to create paste special extensions for both the CME and XPM.

The contest will have prices to incentivize community participation.

Neurocoele

Did the competition happen? If so did anything useful result from it? – Honky

In our case, clipboard access is enabled, still paste special does not work in IE9. out of all option only paste as plain text work, rest option do not work. Is there any special setting to do? – Ramshackle