TinyMCE is one of the very popular editors that been used in variety of applications. If you want to give user more flexibility and options on what he enters to a text area field then tinymce is the simplest way to achieve it.
The other day I had a requirement to update one such value of a text area that was enhanced by tinymce. To starters a simple code to make all your text areas in a page to a tinymce enabled field is as below (you also need to include the tinymce javascript library in your page before this)
tinyMCE.init({
mode : "textareas",
theme : "advanced",
theme_advanced_buttons1 : "bold,italic,underline,separator,link,unlink,code",
theme_advanced_buttons2 : "",
theme_advanced_buttons3 : "",
theme_advanced_toolbar_location : "top",
convert_urls : false,
theme_advanced_toolbar_align : "left",
extended_valid_elements : "a[name|href|target|title|onclick],img[class|src|border=0|alt|title|hspace|vspace|width|height|align|onmouseover|onmouseout|name],hr[class|width|size|noshade],font[face|size|color|style],span[class|align|style]"
});
Now my requirement was that when user enters some field, I had to update the value in one of the text areas after making some ajax call. A simple field update would not work here since the field is no more a simple textarea field. After doing some research I found the following simple solution to this problem (I am using jquery here)
$("#mytextarea").val(comments);
tinyMCE.updateContent("mytextarea");
The above two lines of code did the trick to me. Hope this finds helpful to somebody looking forward
