Text fields with limited length and feedback during editing

29 March 2013 at 00:00 by Ruud van Falier - Post a comment

Here is yet another addition to our ever growing arsenal of Sitecore modules!
As with all our modules, I wrote it because I ran into a shortcoming of the Content Editor while working on our own website:
All our pages have a few inherited fields that are used to store Meta Data content such as the Browser Title and Meta Description fields, for example.
The length of the values of those fields should be kept within a certain limit for SEO purposes.
Google will only display the first 69 characters of the browser title and no more than 156 characters of the meta description.

It's pretty annoying to count the amount of characters you have entered and Sitecore has no way of letting you know how much characters have been inserted, let alone how many you have left.
Wouldn't it be great if you were notified about the number of characters you have entered and how many you have left in a field, while you are typing?
Oh yes, it would!

This module adds two new field types to the Content Editor: Single-Line Text Limited & Multi-Line Text Limited.
Both inherit all functionality from the existing text field controls and add the posibility to configure a maximum allowed value for the field.
The controls inform the user of the number of remaining characters while they are editing.

You can configure the maximum allowed number of characters in the Source property of the field, like this:

That's all you have to do!
You are now ready to use the new fields and that will look like this:

The module is available on GitHub: https://github.com/ParTech/LimitedText-Field-Controls.
If you want to download the Sitecore installation package directly, you can grab it here: https://github.com/ParTech/LimitedText-Field-Controls/raw/master/Release/ParTech.Fields.LimitedTextField-1.0.1.zip.
It will also be added to the Marketplace in the next few days.

As always, we would love to hear your feedback on this.

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