Dojo: The Definitive Guide

Textarea Variations

A bane of traditional web development has often been the dreaded TEXTAREA element that takes up a fixed amount of space on the screen, requiring somewhat of a black art to determine just how much space to allocate to it so as to maximize the amount of viewable area while minimizing wastage on valuable screen real estate.

Textarea

The Textarea dijit inherits from _FormWidget and gives the best of both worlds in that it supports the standard HTML attributes for an ordinary textarea, yet its appearance is a fixed width element that grows vertically as needed. The API for the Textarea dijit simple in that you'll normally only need to use the standard setValue and getValue methods. onChange is a valuable extension point that you can use as a callback when a change occurs:

<textarea dojoType="dijit.form.Textarea" style="width:300px">
    One fish, two fish...
</textarea>

SimpleTextarea

Although Textarea 's ability to expand is convenient in a lot of cases, it doesn't lend itself well to situations in which an enclosing container (such as the layout dijits you'll learn about in Chapter 14) needs to dictate its overall size. For this reason, the SimpleTextarea dijit was introduced. For all practical purposes, the SimpleTextarea behaves just like an ordinary TEXTAREA element except that it can expand and contract in size. You populate it with the same attributes as an ordinary TEXTAREA element such as rows and cols and, like Textarea, you can use setValue and getValue to manipulate ...