How to properly destroy CKEditor instance?

Question

I am running CKeditor 3.4 on a pretty simple page. I am having a problem (sometimes) where when I call document.main_form.submit(), it will not send along the contents of the textarea. After some reading, it sounds like CKeditor is not destroying properly. I tried to manually destroy it before I save the form, but wasn't able to call it. The weird thing is, it works sometimes, but not others. I'm on Chrome, so that may be screwing with things, but the same thing happens in Firefox.

How can I properly destroy the CKeditor so that it always sends the textarea data in POST. Thanks!

Answer 1

I had this problem. What a pain.

To properly destroy the editor instance, try

if (CKEDITOR.instances.myInstanceName) CKEDITOR.instances.myInstanceName.destroy();

From the documentation here

I solved the missing content issue by assigning the contents of the editor to a hidden field prior to postback. I'm using ASP.Net, but it should work universally.

in the client-side click handler of the submit button, call

if (CKEDITOR.instances.myInstanceName)
    document.getElementById('hiddenField').value = CKEDITOR.instances.getData();

Answer 2

I once used angularjs ui-router with one CKEDITOR instance for each sub-view. I used the following solution to clear the instances every time I load the ui-view

for(name in CKEDITOR.instances)
{
    CKEDITOR.instances[name].destroy()
}

Answer 3

In my situation

CKEDITOR.instances.myInstanceName.destroy();

didn't help, because I'd opened CKEditor in jquery dialog on double click on some item. When I closed editor and then opened them again, my code crashed.
Solution was using

CKEDITOR.instances.myInstanceName.destroy(false);

which updated DOM element (link to documentation).