Question

There might be some workaround for this one – however, I’m not sure what it is at the moment. After setting the MaxLength property of a textbox, I am unable to manually exceed the MaxLength of the textBox. On the other hand, if I were to create a loop which programmatically added characters to the textbox – this loop could exceed the maxLength property.

    textBox1.MaxLength = 5;  // I am now unable to manually type in more than 5 chars.

    for (int i = 0; i < 20; i++)
    {
    textBox1.AppendText("D");
    }

// Textbox now holds 20 chars.

Without having to write more lines of code to take a portion of this data, is there a way to ensure that the maxlength property is not exceeded?

Regards,
Evan

Answer 1

MaxLength: Gets or sets the maximum number of characters the user can type or paste into the text box control. (Forms) http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.forms.textboxbase.maxlength.aspx and Gets or sets the maximum number of characters allowed in the text box. (web) http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.ui.webcontrols.textbox.maxlength.aspx

In other words, that’s the point of MaxLength – it’s all about controlling user input. Since you own the textbox to begin with, you don’t need to set your own hard programmatic restrictions.

So in short, no – you can’t change this behavior without overriding some other functionality – for instance on OnChanged – or adding the conditional tests like those shown by Ben and Sres.