Page design woes

gbayliss

I've been experimenting with page design in RTC and I'm beginning to think that I'm missing something fundamental.

I have several text fields that require 150 characters input. In the good old days these fields could be drawn into a form but RTC insists on splitting the fastab into 2 columns.

Is there a way to have a long textbox in RTC?

MarkHamblin

I haven't spent much time playing with this, but I'm not sure it's possible (even with the new 2013 layout options - I think there's a bug in the ColumnSpan property or I'm missing something). Others are having similar issues - e.g., http://mibuso.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=55565

Multiline controls work much better than in classic so having a taller but less wide control might look OK, but I'd be curious to see if anyone's found a decent workaround or knows how to get ColumnSpan working properly.

gbayliss

Thanks for the reply ... glad to know it's not just me seeing this as an issue.

Textbox width seems like a fundamentally useful UI attribute as it gives the user a clue as to the available input length.

It seems very strange that RTC throws this away.

MarkHamblin

gbayliss wrote:

It seems very strange that RTC throws this away.

In 2013 they have allowed for text boxes to span columns - I just haven't been able to get it to work (though I haven't tried with the most recent build from MS - they've released at least 3 since RTM).

If you check the online help for 2013, it has an example of spanning columns:

But when you try to replicate it, you can get the text box spanning, but the size of the control doesn't change: