Max number of characters in textarea

Hi,

I was using Orbeon Forms 4.0.0.rc1.201302120214 PE with development licence and I am trying to limit the number of charachters allowed into a textarea.

Is there a way to do so in orbeon/xforms?

I tried to put the attribute maxlength in the <xf:textarea> tag in the source code but nothing changed.

thank you in advance

Hi

Assuming you want to constrain the data contained within the field, rather than the display of the field, I would recommend having a look at a regular expression constraint on the data.

In Form Builder include a constraint in the validation properties of the control to be something like:

"matches(., '^.{1,20}$')"

(or include it in the underlying data bind).

This will allow the value to be between 1 and 20 characters, as defined by the . (period) character.

I have solved inserting in the field Constraints of the textarea the following code:

string-length(.)<50

where 50 is the upperbound.

thankyou

And if I would like to limit the number displayed in the text area?

not only setting a constraint but preventing the user to enter more charachters than allowed?

thank you

You can add an `xxf:maxlength` attribute on `xf:textarea`. This translates to the HTML `maxlength` attribute. But not all browsers support it, see:

http://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_textarea_maxlength.asp

For older browsers, the alternative is to use some dirty JavaScript to prevent input.

-Erik