Question

I am simply wanting to stop a user entering carriage returns in a TextArea. I have been experimenting with the ‘restrict’ property in the TextArea but cant seem to work it out.

I have the following code:

<mx:Canvas id="cvs1" label="Panel 1" width="100%" height="100%" creationComplete"addEvtListnerOnPlaceText()" backgroundColor="#FFFFFF">
    <mx:TextArea id="txtP1T1" x="10" y="176" text="{placeName}" width="210" textAlign="center" color="#DC0000" restrict="this is where I need some help"/>
</mx:Canvas>

I’m not sure if the restrict property will cover this or not but any help will be much appreciated.

I’ve now managed to get something working:

    private function addEvtListnerOnPlaceText():void{
        txtP1T1.addEventListener(KeyboardEvent.KEY_DOWN, onKeyEventDown);
        txtP1T1.addEventListener(KeyboardEvent.KEY_UP, onKeyEventUp);
    }

    [Bindable]
    public var tempString:String;
    private function onKeyEventDown(e:KeyboardEvent):void
    {
        var character:String = String.fromCharCode(e.charCode);

        if (e.keyCode == 13)
        {
            tempString = txtP1T1.text;
            KeyboardEvent.KEY_UP;
        }

    }
    private function onKeyEventUp(e:KeyboardEvent):void
    {
        var character:String = String.fromCharCode(e.charCode);

        if (e.keyCode == 13)
        {
            txtP1T1.text = tempString;
        }

    }

The only issue now is that if you hold return down, it clears the first carriage return and then keeps adding as long as you hold it down. I need a way to stop this happening without just losing focus on the text area.

Answer 1

No experience with flex3, but after a cursory investigation based on the idea of using an event-driven algorithm it seems you could utilize TextEvents and just remove any newlines/carriage returns in the inputted text before passing to the TextArea.

Alternatively, you may want to take a look at KeyboardEvents.

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However, it seems that utilizing the restrict property would indeed be simplest, as you can just set it to "^\r" and that would exclude carriage returns and only carriage returns from being entered. (Of course I’d recommend using "^\r\n" instead, to provide overall newline protection from both carriage returns, linefeeds, and any combination of the two.)

http://help.adobe.com/en_US/FlashPlatform/reference/actionscript/3/mx/controls/TextArea.html#restrict