Enable drag and drop image into text box

[Domi Sinclair]

It would be nice as a possible future enhancement if it was possible to drag and drop an image into a text box in Mahara. It would be a way of making it easier to add images.

This was suggested by one of my colleagues.

[Aaron Wells (u-aaronw)]

Hi Domi,

Would this be dragging and dropping files from the desktop into a text box? Or dragging the files that you've already uploaded (like, say, we show a palette of thumbnails and you drag those into your text box).

On a related note, the original idea behind the item Bug 1050297, in Mahara 1.8.0, was to be able to drag files (from the desktop) into a Mahara page and have them be automatically uploaded into the file area, and rendered as an appropriate block. For instance, you drag an image, it makes an image block. You drag a PDF, it makes a PDF block. Etc. But we ran into implementation issues trying to handle two kinds of drag and drop in the same zone (uploaded file drag-and-drop, and drag-and-drop of blocks), so we scaled it back to the "upload zone" we have now.

Cheers,
Aaron

[Robert Lyon (robertl-9)]

Hi Domi, Aaron

When I first implemented the drag/drop of files into the Content -> Files part of Mahara there was a bit that (tried to ) allow dropping of files into a block that used a filechooser.

But at the time I couldn't get it to work - partly because the timeframe to get the next release out was looming and partly I'd only been working with Mahara for a few months so the ability to drop a file onto a block config was suppressed.

The blocks with the filebrowser have the 'file_dropzone_container' hidden via css. What is lacking is the rewiring of this zone to use the artefact/file/js/dropzone.js functions - currently on Content -> Files page the dropzone is the whole page

What will be needed is to alter that so we can specify what exactly is the dropzone so that block configuration form can have a specific place as the dropzone.

Cheers

Robert