addingTextbox.md

Adding TextBox

Problem

When you are creating forms, M# chooses default controls for different data-types but sometimes you want to change the control or limit the possible values. Let's take a look at how to define a textbox.

Implementation

When you define a form field using the Field() method, M# automatically chooses a control type based on the data-type of the field. For string and numeric data-types M# chooses the textbox control.

However if you specifically want to define a textbox as the control for a field, you can do so by calling the Control() fluent method on the field. The Control() method takes an enum of type ControlType as its parameter which contains all possible control types which you can define without custom raw HTML code.

Example

Let's define a simplistic form for our product which asks for the product's name. The product entity is a very simple one which doesn't need definition here.

using MSharp;

namespace Modules
{
    public class ProductForm : FormModule<Domain.Product>
    {
        public ProductForm()
        {
            Field(x => x.ProductName).Control(ControlType.Textbox);
            Button("Save").IsDefault().Icon(FA.Check).OnClick(x =>
            {
                x.SaveInDatabase();
                x.GentleMessage("Saved");
                x.ReturnToPreviousPage();
            });
        }
    }
}

The ProductName property is a string and would have a textbox as the control type anyways but here is how to define it explicitly. Sometimes you might want to define the control type of other data-types as textbox which explicit definition will be useful for.

Remarks

If you want to make the textbox multi-line, call the Lines() method on the property definition when defining the entity.