The <asp:textbox> Control

This server control is ASP.NET's version of the HTML textbox form control. In fact, it doubles up and also provides the functionality of the HTML <textarea> form control. Text areas are simply text boxes that feature multiple lines, thus allowing you to input larger quantities of text. The textbox control is also able to supply the functionality of an HTML form password control.

To be able to cover the remit of three HTML form controls, the <asp:textbox> control needs some extra attributes:

•        textmode – specifies whether you want the control to have one line (this is the default, so we don't need to set it if we simply want one line), many lines (set it to multiline), or have a single line of masked content (set it to password if you want to conceal the text that's been entered).

•        rows – specifies the number of rows you want the textbox to have and will only work if textmode is set to multiple.

•        columns – specifies the number of columns you want the textbox to have. It will only work if textmode is set to multiple.

If you wish to provide any default text that appears in the control, you can either place it between the opening and closing tags:

or set it in the text attribute:

Now we'll create a short example that uses the textbox control to ask for the name and address of the user, and a password as well. In HTML, this would require three different types of control: here we shall only use the one <asp:textbox> control.

1.       Time to start your web page editor again and type in the following:

2.       Save this as textboxpage.aspx.

3.       Open textboxpage.aspx in your browser, and type in some details:

4.       Click on Submit Query to see the results:

How It Works

Within the form, we have created three types of textbox control:

The first texbox is identified as text1, and requires no other attributes other than id and runat. This is displayed as a single text field. The second control, text2, is a multiline textbox (which will render as a text area), and requires that we set the textmode attribute to multiline, so that we can set the number of rows we wish this textbox to have. Here, we have set it to five for the address. Lastly, we create a third control, text3, which we set to password with the textmode attribute. This, again, will display a single line text field, but any text typed into it is obscured by asterisks.

To display the results from three sets of controls, we have used three separate <asp:label> controls:

Each one of these is identified with a different id attribute. In this way, we can pass information from each of our three textboxes to a separate label control. The job of assigning text values to these three label controls falls to the ASP.NET code contained within <script> tags at the top of the page.

The code that assigns the values is very repetitive:

First we make sure blank values are assigned to each of the <asp:label> controls in the first three lines. This is because once the page has been posted back, it will display the old messages, unless we clear them.

Then for the first control Message1, we take the text information, and assign it to Message1's text attribute. This will display the name information. For the second control, we take the text information from the second textbox control, and assign it to the text attribute, and we do likewise for the third. Note that the line breaks from the multi-line control (second textbox control) won't display in the label on the result page. Next, we place each statement within an if statement. We will cover how they work in Chapter 6, but for the time being, just think of them being used to check each control individually and decide on whether to display a message depending on if the user has supplied some contents or not. So if you only entered information into the name field, only one message would be displayed. Go ahead, try it and see.

Part 1 : HTML Server Controls Part 2 : Simple Web Theory Part 3 : HTML Forms Part 4 : How the <form> Tag Works in ASP.NET Part 5 : Control Examples Part 6 : Control Attributes Part 7 : The asp:dropdownlist Control Part 8 : The ASP.NET Code Part 9 : The asp:listbox Control Part 10 : The asp:dropdownlist Control Part 11 : The asp:radiobuttonlist Control Part 12 : The asp:checkbox and asp:checkboxlist Control Part 13 : Summary Buy Beginning ASP.NET with C# here © Copyright 2002 Wrox Press This chapter is written by David Sussman, et al and taken from "Beginning ASP.NET with C#" published by Wrox Press Limited in June 2002; ISBN 1861007345; copyright © Wrox Press Limited 2002; all rights reserved. No part of these chapters may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means -- electronic, electrostatic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise -- without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.