How can I get our WYSIWYG editor to stop removing HTML comments, CSS classes and inline styles?

Question

We currently use wysihtml5-rails to let our users edit emails before they are sent but this is not working out so well for a few reasons.

I need the comments to allow for Outlook specific comments like these. All comments are being removed, currently.

I also need the CSS classes to be untouched as the editor content will be a pre-generated email that includes CSS classes. Our editor will only keep classes that are whitelisted but this is annoying as we need to update that list with every change.

Same goes for inline styles. Some of the styles in the generated email are inline instead of in classes. Those need to be kept but they are being removed.

Is there any way I can get our editor to work this way?

Answer 1

I found a solution but it's hacky.

I realized that the raw HTML was being stored on the page in a hidden textarea tag. Interestingly, all the elements that I needed (CSS classes, comments) were still there. But when submitting the form, the value of this textarea was replaced with the parsed results from the editor which gets sent to the server. All the comments and classes are gone from this text.

The solution was then to create a second field that takes the unparsed value from the WYSIWYG editor and sends that along. Easy in rails but just making this new field part of a form. Then the controller can choose which value to take. In my case, I renamed the existing message field to parsed_message . Then added a new message field which will hold the unparsed message.

The WYSIWYG editor we are using allows this by having a method that can be called at any time: window.email_editor.getValue() . Here the email_editor is the editor instantiated by the javascript on the page.