Textarea

In its most basic form this widget renders a <textarea> field which allows multi-line input.

A simple textarea

It also allows you to enable an editor like TinyMCE for HTML content:

TinyMCE editor

Or the Ace editor for syntax highlighting of code input, e.g. PHP:

Ace editor

Options

This table only shows the options relevant to the core functionality of this widget. See the DCA reference for a full field reference.

KeyValueDescription
inputTypetextarea
eval.rtetinyMCE, ace, ace|html, …Enables a texteditor, e.g. tinyMCE for TinyMCE or ace for Ace.
eval.rowsintegerThe rows attribute for the <textarea>
eval.colsintegerThe cols attribute for the <textarea>

When using tinyMCE for the rte option Contao will use the be_tinyMCE.html5 template which contains the initialisation of the editor. You can also create custom TinyMCE initialisation templates and reference them there. For example if you create a be_tinyNews.html5 template you can reference this template in the DCA via 'rte' => 'tinyNews'.

When using ace for the rte option you can optionally also pass a parameter for syntax highlighting. For example if your textarea input is expected to be JSON you can use ace|json. If it is expected to be PHP you can use ace|php etc.

allowHtml and decodeEntities is automatically enabled if rte equals to ace\|html or if it starts with tiny. If rte starts with tiny Contao will also convert any file paths automatically into a {{file::*}} insert tag, if applicable.

Column Definition

Typically the SQL column defintion for textarea fields will be text NULL (['type' => 'text', 'notnull' => false]) as it can contain contents of arbitrary length.

Examples

If you simply want to allow multi-line text input:

// ...
'myTextarea' => [
    'label' => ['Textarea', 'Description'],
    'inputType' => 'textarea',
    'sql' => [
        'type' => 'text',
        'notnull' => false,
    ],
],
// ...

If you want to provide a TinyMCE text editor for your textarea input:

// ...
'myTextarea' => [
    'label' => ['Textarea', 'Description'],
    'inputType' => 'textarea',
    'eval' => [
        'rte' => 'tinyMCE',
        'helpwizard' => true,
    ],
    'sql' => [
        'type' => 'text',
        'notnull' => false,
    ],
],
// ...

If you want to provide the Ace editor with syntax highlighting for JavaScript for your textarea input:

// ...
'myTextarea' => [
    'label' => ['Textarea', 'Description'],
    'inputType' => 'textarea',
    'eval' => [
        'rte' => 'ace|js',
    ],
    'sql' => [
        'type' => 'text',
        'notnull' => false,
    ],
],
// ...

Usage in Contao

The textarea widget is used for the text input in text content elements with TinyMCE enabled. It is also used to allow custom robots.txt input in the settings of your website root. Together with the Ace editor the textarea widget is also used for the additional head tags settings in page layouts as well as for the template editor for example.