RTE with Drag and Drop Images for Touch UI

In the Classic interface of Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), when an author created a page that required a significant amount of text, the author would typically use a Rich Text Editor (RTE). This is especially true when the text needs a higher level of formatting. One commonly used feature of the Classic UI RTE was the ability to include images within the text. This was often the best way to inline images, and conveniently only one component was required.

When the new Touch interface came to AEM, it was able to do many (but not all) of the same things like the classic interface. Each new version of AEM’s Touch interface has added more of the classic interface’s functionality. Even in AEM version 6.3, the Touch interface is still unable to completely duplicate all of the functionality of the Classic UI (Scaffolding mode and the miscadmin page as examples). One of the most conspicuous things that have been missing from the Touch interface has been an RTE that can have images inserted into it. This has typically led to one of three problems:

1. Limited formatting options for authors.
2. Additional components that needed to be developed to fit particular use cases.
3. Developers having to simultaneously develop for the Classic UI as well as Touch UI, requiring the authors to switch back to the Classic UI to edit RTEs.

None of these solutions are particularly satisfactory.

There is a surprisingly simple way to enable the ability, that actually already exists, to directly insert images into a Touch UI RTE by the usual (and much preferred) method of “dragging and dropping”. To enable this feature just add the following property to the richtext field: useFixedInlineToolbar=”{Boolean}true”

For example:
<text
    jcr:primaryType="nt:unstructured"    sling:resourceType="cq/gui/components/authoring/dialog/richtext"    fieldLabel="Text"    name="./text"    useFixedInlineToolbar="{Boolean}true">

It should be noted that this solution works for AEM 6.1 and up.