Text Area control (deprecated)

The Text Area control is a text area field that can have multiple lines of text. It can be configured to display plain text or rich text.

Restrictions and limitations

Important: A Text Area instance expands to occupy the bounding box that is defined in its Positioning properties. For example, if you set the width and height fields in the Positioning properties to 200px, the text area expands to occupy that amount of area. However, in Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 (deprecated), the text area expands only to a maximum default height. The width is not affected by this restriction and the text area occupies the specified width. Other browsers do not have this restriction and the text area expands to the specified height and width.

The Text Area control has a minimum height of 4em, which for the default font is 56px without the label and 77px with the label. In the positioning properties, setting the minimum height to less than these values visually truncates the Text Area instance to make it look partially hidden. If you change the size of the default font in the theme, you change the truncation threshold accordingly.

Data binding

Set the data binding for the control in the General properties tab.

Table 1. Text Area control data binding
Binding description	Data type
The bound data item contains a `String` value that the control displays. The `String` can initially be empty. If the visibility of the control is not `read only`, the control saves to the bound data item any `String` that the user enters into it.	`String`

Theme definitions

The design mode of the theme editor contains a simulation of this control. If you hover over the simulation, it lists the theme definitions that determine the appearance of the control. For information on the theme editor, see Creating themes.

Configuration properties

Set or modify control configuration in the Configuration properties tab.

Table 2. Text Area control configuration properties
Configuration property	Description	Data type
Placeholder hint	Add a brief description or example of the input required by the user. If the bound data item does not contain a value, users see the hint until they type in the field.	`String`
Text area type	Specify whether the text area has plain or rich text. The default value is `Plain Text`. If you select `Rich Text`, a palette for rich-text editing provides content-authoring controls for standard text formatting, link editing, insertion of graphics, and so on.	`TextAreaType`
Disable HTML encoding	Select to display the bound data without using HTML encoding.	`Boolean`