cftextarea -maxlength validation

[John_Sieber]

I have a form field that is a <cftextarea> field that I would like to limit end users to only be able to enter 255 characters. I have tried the following:

<cftextarea name="lDescription" required="no" tabindex=5 class="boxbig"
style="height: 160px;" validate="maxlength" validateAt="onBlur" maxlength="255" message="The listing you have entered has exceeded 255 characters! The administrator may choose to condense the listing before making it available"><cfoutput>#Trim(Detail.lDescription)#</cfoutput></cftextarea>

But this only shows the warning when the user submits the form and saves the entire text to the db. Is there a way that I can limit the text that they type into the field so that it only allows the intended maximum characters or is this not possible with a textarea form field or a cftextarea form field? Thanks in advance and sorry if this is a simple problem.

[Guest]

You can always truncate the text to 255 characters on the action page.

[John_Sieber]

I want to be able to limit the text on the field so that the end user knows when they have reached the 255 character limit so that they do not have to count the characters on their own to see if they are within in the limit. I would be satisfied if when they exceeded the character limit that instead of proceeding to the action page when clicking OK on the warning message instead they would be taken back to the original form so that they could reduce the number of characters in the field. Is there a different type of form field that I should be using or different validation?

[Newsgroup_User]

I've accomplished this kind of thing with some simple javascript that
counts the characters in the text area and stops the submit if it is too
large. I've even augmented it so that is shows an live character count
next to the text area so that the user can see how many characters have
been typed or pasted into the field.

[Newsgroup_User · Accepted solution]

http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex16/maxlength.htm
HTH
--
Tim Carley
www.recfusion.com
info@NOSPAMINGrecfusion.com

[John_Sieber]

quote:

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Originally posted by: Newsgroup User
http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex16/maxlength.htm
HTH
--
Tim Carley
www.recfusion.com
info@NOSPAMINGrecfusion.com

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This worked, Thanks!