The Text widget allows you to add static or dynamic text to your app.
Examples
Use this widget to support app design requirements such as the following:
- You want to display text in the app that supports the other content such as data details and image captions.
- You want to show a dynamic field or expression from a data source. You can combine a Text widget with a List widget so end users can click an item in the list to show details for the corresponding feature, such as attribute values.
Usage notes
The Text widget includes a rich text editor in which you can change the font type, size, color, and so on. For dynamic text, you can set the data source to use attributes or get statistics from multiple feature layers. Common text formatting options are available on a toolbar that appears when you're editing in the Text widget. You can access all the formatting options in the widget’s configuration panel. To edit hyperlinked text, click the linked text, click the Link button on the Content tab, edit the configured link, and close the Set link panel.
Tip:
When typing in the text editor, use keyboard shortcuts to undo or redo text edits (Ctrl+Z for undo and Ctrl+Y for redo). The Undo and Redo buttons on the builder toolbar are based on the actions performed in the builder, such as connecting data or adding the Text widget.
Settings
The Text widget includes the following settings:
- Connect to data—Optionally connect the widget to specific data. (A data source is not required for a Text widget.)
- Select data—Select the data to populate content in the widget. You can select multiple data sources for a single Text widget and combine static text with dynamic content. For example, you can type a sentence and choose a field to populate a value from a selected feature.
- Once you connect data, the Dynamic content button
appears on the widget’s toolbar so you can continue to configure the data connection.
- Wrap—Turn text wrapping on or off.
- Text format—Use the following common formatting options:
- Font—Change the font type and change the font size by unit using pixels (px) or rem.
- Basic font settings—Apply bold, italic, strikethrough, and underline formatting to text and choose a highlight color and font color.
- Link—Format text as a hyperlink to open a page, section view, or web address. Select text in the widget to enable this button.
- Paragraph layout—Adjust the paragraph alignment (left, center, right, or justify), use bulleted or numbered list formatting, and increase or decrease the indent.
- Character spacing—Adjust the space between characters by unit using pixels (px) or rem.
- Line spacing—Adjust line and paragraph spacing for your text. The default is 1.5 lines.
- Clear all formatting—Select formatted text and click this button to clear any existing formatting.
Caution:
When a variable phrase from dynamic content is included in the selected text, this button removes its content because it’s treated as text formatting.
Dynamic content
When you connect the Text widget to data, the toolbar that appears for the widget’s inline-editing mode includes another button, Dynamic content . This button opens a window with the following options to get dynamic content from the selected data source.
Note:
If you connected to multiple data sources, choose the data source from the Data list.
- Attribute—Choose the field from the selected data for which you want to show attribute values in the Text widget. Once you choose a field, it’s added to the editable text area as a field name variable—the field name in curly brackets. The variable is populated with feature attribute values based on the connections you configure, such as using a Text widget to show place names in a list that’s connected to the same layer.
- Statistics—Get statistics function results (MAX, MIN, AVERAGE, and SUM) for a selected field or the data count (COUNT) from the corresponding data source to insert into the text widget.
- Expression—Build a more complex expression with the five function operators (AVERAGE, COUNT, SUM, MAX, and MIN) and data fields to insert into the text widget.