Implementing TinyMCE spellchecker with GoogleSpell in ASP.Net

A colleague and I spent a few hours this afternoon trying to find a way to implement spellchecking with the TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor. The editor has a spellchecking plugin, but according to the wiki documentation it requires PHP. However, one of the options in the spellchecking plugin is to use the Google Spelling web service and this should of course be possible to call through .net as well. Luckily we stumbled upon the "TinyMCE .Net package" before developing the solution ourselves. It really is strange that there is no comment about this on the TinyMCE Wiki. (I believe I will make one. ;-)

These are the steps you need to take to activate spellchecking in TinyMCE within a .Net website application: (this instruction assumes you have already implemented TinyMCE in your website)

1. Download the TinyMCE .Net Package.
2. In that download you will find a .dll-file - Moxiecode.TinyMCE.dll - add a reference to it from your website project.
3. Add the following tag in the HttpHandlers section in web.config:

   <add verb="GET,HEAD,POST" path="TinyMCE.ashx" type="Moxiecode.TinyMCE.Web.HttpHandler,Moxiecode.TinyMCE" />

4. Go to your javascript initialization code of your tinyMCE and add the bold parts of this snippet:

   tinyMCE.init({
       theme : "advanced",
       mode : "textareas",
       plugins : "spellchecker",
       theme_advanced_buttons3_add : "spellchecker",
       spellchecker_languages : "English=en,+Swedish=sv",
       spellchecker_rpc_url : "TinyMCE.ashx?module=SpellChecker"
   });

   Note that if you already are using the plugins setting, you only have to add "spellchecker" to the comma separated list, the same goes for your button configuring. If you omit the spellchecker_langugages you will get support for English, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish out of the box, with english set as default. If you want to omit some languages use the format above for the languages you wish to support, and add a + in front of the one you want as default. The text before the = character is your custom label for the language and the text after is the ISO code for the language. Don't forget the spellchecker_rpc_url setting that will connect the spellchecking button with the Moxiecode.TinyMCE.dll which handles the call to the google spell service. For a sample of how the spell function looks, se this sample and click the sixth button in the last row (this sample might not use the google service, so the word suggestions etc might be different, but it will give you the look and feel of the spelling function).

I've had some trouble finding good documentation of the Google Spell Service and it seems as if it is no longer updated but still available to developers already using it (which should include the TinyMCE .Net package even though you haven't used it before). However, use at your own risk should Google decide to delete it. This is the only official documentation I can find and that isn't much...