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Update to CKEditor 5 v34.x

When updating your CKEditor 5 installation, ensure all the packages are the same version to avoid errors.

For custom builds, you may try removing the package-lock.json or yarn.lock files (if applicable) and reinstalling all packages before rebuilding the editor. For best results, make sure you use the most recent package versions.

# Update to CKEditor 5 v34.0.0

Released on April 12, 2022.

For the entire list of changes introduced in version 34.0.0, see the release notes for CKEditor 5 v34.0.0.

Below are the most important changes that require your attention when upgrading to CKEditor 5 v34.0.0.

# Collaboration Server On-Premises version must be at least 4.5.0

The latest version of CKEditor contains some fixes and improvements for the WebSockets communication with the CKEditor Cloud Services servers. If you use the on-premises version of CKEditor Cloud Services (that is, Collaboration Server On-Premises), CKEditor v34.0.0 will only work with the server in version 4.5.0 or higher.

Before updating your CKEditor instance to v34.0.0 please make sure you have the updated version of Collaboration Server On-Premises, too.

# Additional dependencies in CKEditor 5 Collaboration Features

The DLL builds support was introduced for revision history. As a result, some imports, plugin requirements and cross-package dependencies have changed to allow for the new building process. From now on, additional plugins will be required, when certain CKEditor 5 collaboration features are added to the editor.

RealTimeCollaborativeRevisionHistory will require adding RevisionHistory to the list of the editor plugins:

// ❌ Old imports:
import RealTimeCollaborativeRevisionHistory from '@ckeditor/ckeditor5-real-time-collaboration/src/realtimecollaborativerevisionhistory';
// ✅ New imports:
import RealTimeCollaborativeRevisionHistory from '@ckeditor/ckeditor5-real-time-collaboration/src/realtimecollaborativerevisionhistory';
import RevisionHistory from '@ckeditor/ckeditor5-revision-history/src/revisionhistory';

# Changed mechanism for setting and clearing the editor read-only mode

With this update, the editor.isReadOnly property becomes read-only. Setting it manually is no longer permitted and will result in an error.

Changing the editor mode it now possible only via dedicated methods that introduce a lock mechanism. Thanks to that, various features that can set the read-only mode will not collide and will not have to know about each other. Basically, the editor will become editable again only if all of these features that earlier set it to be read-only will again allow for that.

The new methods on the Editor class are editor.enableReadOnlyMode( lockId ) and editor.disableReadOnlyMode( lockId ), which enable and disable the read-only mode respectively.

The lock mechanism turns the editor read-only if there is at least one lock set. After all of these locks are removed, the content becomes editable again. Because each feature is responsible only for setting and removing its own lock, they hence do not come into conflict with each other. Before introducing this change, setting and removing the read-only state of the editor could result in its content being editable when it should not.

// ❌ Old usage:
function makeEditorReadOnly() {
    editor.isReadOnly = true;
}

function makeEditorEditable() {
    editor.isReadOnly = false;
}

// ✅ New usage:
const myFeatureLockId = Symbol( 'my-feature' );

function makeEditorReadOnly() {
    editor.enableReadOnlyMode( myFeatureLockId );
}

function makeEditorEditable() {
    editor.disableReadOnlyMode( myFeatureLockId );
}