User Form text_area doesn't support the pattern attribute

[hansen-m]

Based on the documentation and my testing the User Form text_area doesn't support the pattern attribute to check it against a regular expression. Can this be added so that it functions in the same way as text_field does?

https://osc.github.io/ood-documentation/latest/how-tos/app-development/interactive/form.html

[johrstrom]

Hi, thanks for the issue, but unfortunately no we can't. The pattern HTML attribute only applies to text, tel, email, url, password, and search input types.

Which is to say, even if we could embed the attribute in the HTML, browsers won't respond to it.

From the MDN documentation for the same:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Attributes/pattern

[hansen-m]

@johrstrom Thanks for that info, makes sense now.

Are there any examples of how this or something similar might be done within the form.js instead?

[johrstrom]

Well I guess you'd want to attach an event handler to the launch button's onclick event. When there is a click event, validate the text area. Browsers do the validation of patterns automatically and update the HTML to show the error. You're not going to be able to do the same exact thing within javascript, but maybe a window.alert could work.