Question

Is there any way in MVC to specify “Empty Text” for text fields?

Empty Text is normally a property give to a textbox to display when text is empty, and is cleared out OnClick.

For example: have the text box say “Enter here…” and then onFocus that text would clear and allow you to type in the entry, however if text is empty, “Enter here…” would display again.

I’m trying to find out if there’s any ways to get this out of the box w/o any additional coding, as this feature is widely supported by 3rd Party controls (ie: Telerik’s AJAX Controls) does anyone know if MS made any provisions to offer anything similar?

Thanks.

Answer 1

You could use HTML5 placeholder attribute:

@Html.TextBoxFor(x => x.SomeProperty, new { placeholder = "some default text" })

And if you need to support older browsers you could always achieve the same effect with javascript. For example there are existing jQuery plugins such as jQuery.placeholder.