Accepted, Not Yet Planned

Update: This idea is currently not planned based on our program planning and prioritization of all Tridion Sites ideas for early 2018. We may revisit this and other great ideas based on more information and additional votes. 

Notes:

GetTemplateFragment only applies in the context of templating, so any changes would not change this method. But I added text to the original idea to make it clear the request is about ECL previews for editors. This would be in the context of editing and selecting items.

The existing ECL functionality does allow editors see ECL images and thumbnails for videos, but not a full (video) player directly in the rich text format area. Editors can, however, see rendered ECL items using their Staging environment or with Content Manager Explorer Preview, depending on their templating logic.

See related questions, answers, and comments on Tridion Stack Exchange:

Control How Content Editors Preview ECL Items (ECL: Implement GetTemplateFragment)

It appears that GetTemplateFragment does not actually allow us to modify the HTML output before returning the thumbnail on ECL items. As per my support request, GetTemplateFragment is never used during the whole ECL item selection process. I'd like to be able to modify the output of an ECL item within the RTF editor so our writers can properly preview a video or other ECL item.

Ryan Wittenburg

  • I think this idea is to use the GetTemplateFragment() method on the ECL API for generating a preview on the CME side, right?

    For that I think it is even worth having a separate method like GetPreviewFragment(). I can imagine that in some cases the CME preview should behave different from the website, for example:

    - if ECL loads a large video I might want to have a thumbnail or lowres for preview

    - the CME preview can be te latest available (draft) version of the asset, not the current live one

    - if the ECL provider generates any kind of special controls, HTML makup wit classes, TCDL tag, or anything else that has assumtions about the web application, then the CME needs to have a differnt HTML fragment which the CME can understand.