OOTB Rich Text Editor - more than catches the eye
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Introduction
As part of Release Wave 2, Microsoft shipped out of the box rich text control with embedding image support (more details here). And while trying it out I found more than I expected.
Under the hood
Let’s start with the control itself. Proper rich text control was requested for a long time and it was one of the few custom PCF controls built as soon as PCF became a thing. If we inspect the page closer we can see that MS used CKE editor for their component.
Fantastic pictures and where to find them
Now let’s move to the interesting part - adding pictures. I was really curious how Microsoft enable storing images or to be more precise where do they store them? Usually, attachments in CDS are stored as notes or as a “new” file fields. But to do the same thing with OOTB control would be impossible - what if someone would like to use it on the entity that doesn’t have notes enabled? Also storing multiple files in one file field is not possible. And the solution used by MS was unexpected - use a new entity called Rich Text Attachment (msdyn_richtextfile).
If we inspect control with added images we can see that each image stored under separate msdyn_richtextfile record. Editor queries one field from that entity called Image Blob (msdyn_imageblob).
If we open Maker Portal and take a look into that field we can see that Image Blob is an Image field and also marked as a Primary Image field.
If you don’t know what is Image field you can find more here. Below is a small definition of this field type from Microsoft:
Use image fields to display a single image per record in the application. Each entity can have one image field. You can add an image field to custom entities but not to standard entities. Some standard entities have image fields defined.
Maximum size for this field is 10 Mb but you cannot add a file bigger than 5Mb via the editor.
Conclusion
To be able to release OOTB rich text control MS created a new entity called Rich Text Attachment which is used to store images added to the component.