Jim said:

Is there a way to specify a maximum of characters allowed to be entered in the mulitple lines of text part of the form? I need to limit people to 170 characters for their classified ads.

Thanks!

Yes, Jim that's possible. Just setup a Multiple lines of text field and provide it with the following configuration:

170 chars max|your text|^.{1,170}$

• This will set the fields' label to: 170 chars max
• Provide a default text: your text
• And apply the regexp logic: ^.{1,170}$
  Which essentially says: any character from start (^) to finish ($) is required at least once (1), and max 170 times

Hope this helps.

Sorry for the confusion Jim, the user can enter more characters but the form will not validate. Ie. to not confuse the user, you could add a text paragraph (text-only field) above this input field, highlighting the requirements for proper validation.

If the user enters more than the 170 characters (again, he/she can do that) the field will get a red border, the form is not sent. To actually control the text box to not let the user type in more than X characters requires more extensive JS coding and only works in JS enabled browsers.

From what I understadnd your point is to make sure more than X characters don't get submitted.

I think I know what the issue is, check if you actually made the respective input fields "Is Required" on the main form admin page, otherwise the regular expression won't kick in.

PS: People are so used to only read the fine print (to not overlook something), so making this text paragraph a font: 6px; should do just fine ;)) kidding of course… 

Well,it seems some of our customers get a bit confused when they enter more than the allowed number of characters, get the red border, but the red border doesn't go away when they reduce the # of characters to the proper amount. 

Apart from my writing an explaination for this, which they won't read,  do you have suggestions?  If the ability to stop a user fromentering more than x amount of characters isn't possible due to the js issue you mentioned, is is possible to get the form to not have the red border once they've reduced the words in their ad? I know you can hit refresh on the browser, but I really can't have a ton of instructions for the user.

tahnks,

Jim 

Hallo Oliver,  it seems this character limit method has stopped working, possibly with upgrade 7.0.  Should it still work in current versions?  The person entering our classified ads just alerted me to the problem, but didn't recall how long this has been happening.  I sort of need to get that working again to stop people from rambling on in their classified ads.

Thanks,

Jim

Perhaps I'm confused…

If I want to limit a single-line text field, why can't I just set the size and maxlength attributes to the <input> tag? I can also do the regex for validation, but wouldn't the two attributes above (for single-line text input, not for multi-line) prevent someone from typing too much?

Rich

That is correct, but for single-line text input, how do I incorporate the maxlength and size attributes, I can't figure out how to add those in Cforms.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Rich