Text Area field

Description

A text input field allows the user to enter and edit multiple lines of text, without length restriction.

The input field can have a label, which will show to the left of the input field and a description, which can span multiple lines. The description is placed above the input field and uses the entire available layout width. The width of the input field must be explicitly set using the size attribute, otherwise it will only accommodate a single character.

The default number of lines of the text area field is 5 rows if not specified otherwise using the height attribute.

To specify a text input field create a <field> tag and use the type attribute with a value of textarea. The txt and id attributes are not supported here. The variable attribute specifies the variable that should be replaced with the text taken from the input field.

Data

The data consists of two items, a description and the spec. The <spec> tag uses four attributes. The label text is specified with txt and/or id as described above. In addition, the width and the height of the input field as it appears on the panel can be set with the size or height attribute. The value must be an integer and sets the field width based on the average character width of the active font. If this is not specified, then you will end up with a very narrow field that is practically unusable.

The fourth attribute set is optional. It takes a text string to pre-fill the input field.

Example

The following example creates a text input field with a label and description. The width of the input field will be enough to accommodate 15 characters and has 3 rows. The field will be pre-set with the text 'some text' when the UI is first presented.