Text area control - General tab

A text area is an area in which the user types or pastes one or multiple lines of text, without formatting the text. You can complete the General tab while adding a Text area control.

Field Description
Property Press the down arrow to select a property reference that identifies a single text value.

Alternatively, you can drag a property name from the lists of properties visible in the Application Explorer. Typically, this works for Single Value properties belonging to in the Applies to class of the current rule (or a higher class). If the container in which this field sits has a non-blank Using Page value, you can drag a Single Value property from within that embedded page property.

Click the Open icon to review the property (if the reference is to an existing property in the Applies To class of this rule or a parent of that class). If the property is not found, the New dialog box for the property form appears.

You can reference properties on any page identified on the Pages & Classes tab, using the normal notation pagename.propertyname for pages other than the page corresponding to the Applies To class of the rule.

If this field is in a cell of a section that includes parameter declarations on the Parameters tab, you can enter the notation param.NAME here, to use a parameter value for the field, where NAME identifies a string parameter. Make sure that the NAME parameter is declared on the Parameters tab, and that your application provides a non-blank value for the parameter value in all possible situations where the section appears. See Sections — Completing the Parameter tab.

For a harness, the property generally must be on the primary page of the rule — the page corresponding to the Applies To key part of the rule. However, a section within the harness may have a different Applies To class, and that section can include properties from its own class.

If this field is always displayed as read-only, you can enter a linked property reference here, of the form .AAAA.BBBB, where AAAA is the linked property and BBBB is any property reference in the object identified by the value of AAAA as a key. For example, if the property AAAA has a value corresponding to a key of a Data-Admin-Operator-ID instance, then .AAAA.pyUserName presents that Operator ID's full name. This allows values from that object to appear (read-only) in the run-time display, though your processing does not explicitly load the object onto the clipboard.

Default value Optional. Enter a constant value for the property value, a property reference, or an expression, to be used only when the user form or flow action form appears in read-write mode rather than read-only mode.

Choose a default value that speeds data entry. When the system renders a harness or section in read-only mode (for example because the read-write mode requires a privilege that the current user does not hold), the default value does not appear, because data entry is not permitted.

Visibility

To control the visibility of the label, select one of the following:

  • Always : always visible
  • Condition (expression) : the region is visible under the specified condition. In the field that displays, select a condition or click the Open condition builder icon to open the Condition Builder. You can define a simple expression based on the comparison of a pair of constants, properties, or both, combined by Boolean operators, such as .Color="Red". You can combine the expression with a when condition rule or another expression using the && and || operators.
  • Condition (when) : the region is visible under the specified condition. In the field that displays, select a when rule. Click the Open icon to create a new when condition or review an existing when condition.

If this section is to become part of navigation in a composite portal, you can make the header visible only when a specific space is the current space. Enter an expression here similar to the following:

pyCurrentSpace=="ASpaceName"
Then select the Run visibility condition on client check box.
Disable  
Wrap Text Select if the label is to be presented as multiple lines when the text is longer than the cell width. If this check box box is not selected, the label may appear truncated at runtime.
Required This box appears only for fields in cells on flow actions and sections. Select to require that (when the form appears at runtime in read-write mode) users cannot successfully submit the form if the field is blank.

Selecting Required marks the label for this field with an orange asterisk when the flow action form appears in read-write mode. (The asterisk also appears if the Label control's Value For field is not blank and the Label control's Required box is checked.)

For sections, checking this box enables client-side format validation when this section is part of a harness form that has the Enable Client Side Validation box selected on the HTML tab. At runtime, users who leave this field blank and submit the form are notified immediately that the field is required; the form is not transmitted to the server.

Identifiers  
Tour ID Optional: Provide an ID for use in a guided tour. Use a combination of numbers, letters, and underscores. Pega Platform uses the Tour ID when it finds an anchor button during a tour stop anchor point.
Test ID

Optional: If authorized, you can provide a unique Test ID to better support automated testing of your application.

When creating a control that supports you can use a combination of numbers, letters, and underscores, or click the Generate ID button to create a unique ID. The attribute data-test-id is then generated for the selected element.

After the test ID has been generated, you can view your Test ID in HTML or display it in the Live UI panel. You also have the option to have all controls that support Test IDs in a ruleset updated in bulk.

The Test ID is available to access groups that include the PegaRULES:TestID privilege. To disable Test ID, remove the PegaRULES:TestID from the access group.