16956 - Insert Text File

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: Composition, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Matthew Tuck [:CodeMachine]]

It would be very useful to be able to insert a text file at the cursor point.
It would be nice if it detected non-text files and refused to insert them.

Comment 1

[Phil Peterson]

Beth or Steve, do you think this is an editor issue?

Comment 2

[buster]

It could go either way.  The editor knows how to insert data types off the
clipboard, so it shouldn't be a big leap to get those same data types out of a
file.  The tricky part is knowing what data type you have in a file.  I think
the parser can help us out here. Rick?

We had talked about making this a feature of the editor, but cut it due to time
constraints.

The embedding application, or course, can always provide this feature on top of
the editor regardless of whether the editor provides "InsertContentFromFile()."
We should probably add this method to our API, mark it as unimplemented, and get
to it when we can.

So I'll leave this bug for you, Phil, to decide if you want to implement this
feature on top of the existing editor APIs.  That means the mail app would have
to provide UI, get the file content, determine the data type, and call the
appropriate nsIHTMLEditor API.  cc'ing Akkana so she can tell us if I'm way out
in left field.

Comment 3

[Akkana Peck]

The editor and editor shell have methods to insert text and html, so it's no
problem to do that -- just read in the file contents, do some sort of switching
based on the filename or other knowledge of the file's mime type, and insert it
via the standard editor commands.  So it could be done in JS (assuming there's a
way to read the contents of a file from JS) or in C++.

I'd love to see a menu item to do this, both in the editor and in mail compose.

Comment 4

[pmock]

changing QA assigned to myself

Comment 5

[Phil Peterson]

Add to the help wanted list.

Comment 6

[rubydoo123]

removing myself from the cc list

Comment 7

[Kathleen :Brade]

*** Bug 120695 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 8

[Kathleen :Brade]

reassign to module owner to get back on radar

Comment 9

[Jean-Francois Ducarroz]

reassign to varada.

Comment 10

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

taking all of varada's bugs.

Comment 11

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

*** Bug 91102 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 12

[Alfonso Martinez]

*** Bug 210555 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 13

[Alfonso Martinez]

*** Bug 195859 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 14

[Peter Anvin]

This bug seems to be somewhat stale... I would like to add my vote as this, in
my opinion, the number one problem with the Mozilla mail editor.

Comment 15

[Jakob Naumann]

I have to aggree with the last comment: for me this also is the
number one feature mozilla is lacking. It would be great if 
someone could decide to work on that.

Comment 16

[Jürgen Ernst]

Inserting textblocks (textfiles) from a list ist a BIG MISSING FEATURE in mozilla.
The lack of this feature prevents to use mozilla in enterprises.
Inserting textblocks speeds up replying to customer requests.
This missing feature prevents an enterprise (I'm supporting) to get rid of
microsofts outlook. That's not good!

Comment 17

[Seva Gluschenko]

My $.02. Guys, isn't it a complete shame to process such an issue for 5 (five!)
years? Keep in mind, this feature is demanded and could increase popularity of
Mozilla alot.

Comment 18

[Jürgen Ernst]

Today I changed to Thunderbird 1.5 and installed the extension "Quicktext" from Emil Hesslow. It works fine. I don't know if "Quicktext" will work for Mozilla, but the combination of Thunderbird and "Quicktext" fixes this "Bug" here.

Comment 19

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

sorry for the spam.  making bugzilla reflect reality as I'm not working on these bugs.  filter on FOOBARCHEESE to remove these in bulk.

Comment 20

[Serge Gautherie (:sgautherie)]

Filter on "Nobody_NScomTLD_20080620"