Canvas Rich Content Editor

The Canvas LMS Rich Content Editor (RCE) extracted in it's own npm package for use across multiple services

In the Canvas ecosystem, this npm module is used in conjunction with the Rich Content Service (RCS) microservice. The code for the RCS is also open source and lives in the canvas-rce-api repository. (see https://github.com/instructure/canvas-rce-api)

Some features require a running instance of the canvas-rce-api, but you do not need an instance in order to do development on @instructure/canvas-rce. (see the Development section)

The primary consumer of the @instructure/canvas-rce is canvas-lms, so documentation and references throughout documentation might reflect and assume the use of canvas-lms.

Install and Setup

As a published npm module, you can add @instructure/canvas-rce to your node project by doing the following:

npm install @instructure/canvas-rce --save

For guidance on how @instructure/canvas-rce is used within Canvas, please reference the canvas-lms use of canvas-rce to get an idea on how to incorporate it into your project. Pay special attention to the RichContentEditor.js and serviceRCELoader.js.

Outside of Canvas, the CanvasRce React component is your entry point.

Tests

First, build assets. Then you can run the tests:

yarn build:all
yarn test:jest

There are still legacy mocha tests run with yarn test:mocha. The command yarn test runs them all.

Test Debugging Hints

yarn test:jest:debug path/to/__test__/file.test.js

will break and wait for you to attach a debugger (e.g. chrome://inspect/#devices).

Similarly, for mocha tests

yarn test:mocha:debug path/to/test/file.test.js

Both those commands may include a --watch argument to keep the process alive while you iterate.

Polyfills

This project makes use of modern JavaScript APIs like Promise, Object.assign, Array.prototype.includes, etc. which are present in modern browsers but may not be present in old browsers like IE 11. In order to not send unnecessarily large and duplicated code bundles to the browser, consumers are expected to have already globally polyfilled those APIs. Canvas only supports modern browsers and the RCE has not been tested in older browsers like IE. If you need suggestions for how to include polyfills in your own app, you can put this in your html above the script that includes @instructure/canvas-rce:

<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/polyfill/v2/polyfill.min.js"></script>

Development

See DEVELOPMENT.md