Improved Text Elements

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Robert Frankel

July 15, 2019 21:09

I frequently use text area elements to clean up my UX's by concatenating/consolidating data from preceding elements. While text wrapping is automatic, height is fixed.

I can specify the number of lines showed on the device using \t, \n etc.

The problem I have is considerable wasted space if I only need 2-3 lines, particularly when multiple text areas are involved. 

 

It it would be great if text areas could be expanded or collapsed based on the number of lines the developer wishes to display on the device.

 

Further, if there was any possibility of using HTML tags to format text within text areas that could be useful, although maybe that feature exists and I've just missed it. 

 

Thanks, folks. 

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  Jonathan Hsu July 16, 2019 14:19

  Rob, thanks for the suggestion. I want to make sure I understand correctly, you'd like to set a default height for the Text Area pre-input. What happens if the text that is eventually entered is either less lines or more lines than the defaulted value?

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  Robert Frankel July 16, 2019 14:59

  Jonathan -

   

  That won't be an issue.  If I'm setting the default height of the object, consider it an output.  I use Tab, Line Feed and Line Breaks to assure that the information populating the element is consistent across all devices.  Consequently, there would never be a risk of less or more lines showing than I want to display because presumably I'd catch that during development or testing.

   

  It has to be this way in my case because showing the text element provides narrative and data from other preceding elements in a summary format intended to allow hiding of previous elements and a less cluttered interface.

   

  The risk you mention above pertains more to user input, the "traditional" use of the text area element, and actually that's another limitation that might be worth addressing.  That case arises where I do NOT want to specify a default height because I'm using the text area in the normal fashion, a place for the user to enter comments.  An enhancement might be allowing height of the element to expand or collapse automatically based on the amount of text entered by the user.  If the user enters two lines, the text element is two lines high, four lines, four lines high.  You're already wrapping the text automatically, so having the element become fully dynamic in this manner would be very desirable at least in my case.

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  Robert Frankel July 16, 2019 19:15

  Jonathan - 

   

  I forgot to add.  It would be also be great if there were a Read-Only property to check for text areas.  When the element is being used specifically and only to return information to the user or for reporting I do not want the user to be able to alter the contents. 

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  Jonathan Hsu July 17, 2019 14:55

  Rob,

  I think you and I are actually on the same page. I was teasing out your requirements because something that's been proposed is a property for read-only elements to change their appearance from a text element that has been filled out to text directly on the background of the app without the white backdrop. The original intention is to retire the read-only attribute on text elements but it may be able to accommodate your multi-line read-only reference use case!

  What do you think? If you're not sure what I'm talking about then try to turn on the read-only attribute (checkbox) for a text element.

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  Darius Grimes January 01, 2020 17:29

  Couldn't you do that with a label, the only downside is that the label wont print on a report?

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