This feature is now implemented for v2.0.0.70. See ChangeNoteContainerPresentation.

The Problem This is a test

Due to the nature of the wiki syntax, it is not easy to style certain parts of a FlexWiki installation beyond changing the colours and background images according to the default CSS. It is possible to override and extend the existing stylesheet by using the StylesheetOverride feature, but invariably if you want to add a styled area to a wiki topic you need to be able to assign an id to it, or at the least specify a new CSS style.

The Rendered Implementation

One way to style a section in HTML is to wrap that section in a <div> element and to supply an id and/or a CSS style such as:

  <div id="test" class="newstyle">Hello World</div>

If this is rendered into the HTML output for the wiki, you can then use the StylesheetOverride to define a CSS style for the defined class and/or the id and you can also style child elements based on this element, too.

The Proposed Solution this is a test

What I propose to implement is two extensions to the PresentationPrimitive, called ContainerStartPresentation and ContainerEndPresentation, in a similar manner to the FormStartPresentation and FormEndPresentation types. The ContainerStartPresentation would render the opening <div> element with it's optional id and class attributes. The ContainerEndPresentation would render the closing </div> element. The user can then render any wiki syntax between the two to wrap them and enable better styling support

For an example of the FormStartPresentation and FormEndPresentation in action, see the FormStartPresentationDemo.

Comments and Feedbacks

Any comments, feedback, questions, etc. are always welcome.

Progress

I've trialled an implementation of this as described above and the only issue I've come across is the nightmare that is the FlexWiki Formatter! Unfortunately, just about everything gets wrapped in a <p> and a </p>, yes you guessed it, including the start and end <div> elements I'll need to look at the formatter a bit more to see if I can do anything to make the HTML output a bit more reasonable, but the Formatter is hideous, so it may be tough. Wish me luck -- DerekLakin, 25/July/2007

OK after a little digging into the Formatter I've found that I can handle Behaviours that start a wiki text line on their own, thus ensuring that the output doesn't get wrapped. This also has the positive side effect of removing <p> wrapping for other presentations such as forms and form fields. I've corrected the relevant unit tests and will commit this feature soon -- DerekLakin, 26/July/2007

This feature is now implemented.