Posted on Tuesday, March 21, 2006 6:04 AM
First off, sorry for the absence. Things got a little busy in life as well as work. Not to mention having to get up to speed on 2.0 in a big hurry. All good things, but it left less time for fun stuff.
With that said, I want to offer a little tip to help with formatting your ASP.Net pages. Getting a label to be multiline within a set width. Now many of you know this trick, but I always have to re-remember the trick every time I need it, so this post can be a reference for you as well.
The trick is actually this – Don’t use a label. Use a textbox instead. Since all the controls inherit from the same base class, the text box and the label are very similar anyway. But only the textbox has the multiline capability.
Once you have the textbox on your page the trick is to make it look like a label for the end user. To do this you need to set the following properties (This is the part I can never remember):
Wrap = true; (obviously)
rows = {some number greater than 0} (I use the rows property rather than the height property as it tends to be earier to get the formatting right)
ReadOnly = true (makes sense, right)
TextMode = multiline (or there no real reason to wrap the text…)
BorderStyle = None
BorderWidth = 0
Those last two are actually VERY important, and here is why. They get rid of that pesky border that you see around text boxes. That border is a common visual signal to the end user that says “ENTER INFO HERE!”. If you leave the border up expect a lot of phone calls from folks saying “The web page is broken. It won’t let me enter text.”
So use this in good faith. More controls soon. Even my first 2.0 controls.
