Long Text

The “Long text” attribute is intended for longer text input. It is displayed as a textarea widget in the backend and can optionally be equipped with a rich text editor (RTE such as TinyMCE). Typical use cases:

Description texts, product descriptions, article texts
Free text fields for multi-line input
HTML content (when RTE is enabled)

The maximum length is 65,535 characters (MySQL type TEXT).

Installation

The attribute is installed via the Contao Manager or Composer:

composer require metamodels/attribute_longtext

Settings when Creating the Attribute

The long text attribute has no specific settings when creating. Only the general attribute settings are used:

Name, column name, description
Override variants

Settings in Render Settings

The long text attribute has no specific render settings. In the attribute list of a render setting, the usual options are available:

Option	Description
Template	Selection of a custom template for the output of the long text. If no template is specified, the output is as plain text or HTML.
CSS class	Optional CSS class added to the output element.

Settings in the Input Form

When the long text attribute is added to an input form, the following options are available:

Display

Option	Description
Backend class	CSS classes for the display of the field in the backend form (e.g. `long clr` for full width with line break).
Template for backend	Selection of a custom widget template for the backend form.
Template for frontend	Selection of a custom widget template for frontend editing (only available if the “Frontend Editing” extension is installed).
Rich text editor (RTE)	Activation and selection of a rich text editor (e.g. `tinyMCE` or `ace`). If no RTE is selected, a simple textarea field appears.
Syntax highlighting mode	Selection of the syntax highlighting for the source code editor `ace`.
Rows	Number of visible rows of the textarea field (height) — typically overridden by Contao CSS. When the template `be_tinyMCE_mm` or `be_ace_mm` is selected, the height values are passed to the widget as an option — for `tinyMCE` as pixels and for `ace` as rows.
Columns	Number of visible characters per row of the textarea field (width) — typically overridden by Contao CSS.

Functions

Option	Description
Required field	Makes the field a required field.
Allow HTML input	Allows the input of HTML tags in the text field (without RTE).
Keep tags	HTML tags are not filtered or encoded when saving.
Decode entities	HTML entities are decoded when saving.

Overview (backend filter and search)

Option	Description
Filterable	The attribute is available in the backend as a filter criterion.
Searchable	The attribute is available in the backend as a search field.

Filter Rules

The long text attribute can be used with the following filter rules:

Filter rule	Note
Text search	Free text input for full-text search in the long text field.
Levenshtein-based search	Similarity search with typo tolerance; requires the package `attribute_levenshtein`.
Loupe	Full-text index search; requires the package `filter_loupe` (from MM 2.4).

Special Functions

Rich text editor (RTE)

A RTE such as TinyMCE can be enabled via the input form. Note that the RTE formats the entered HTML content and encodes entities when saving. The “Allow HTML input” option should also be enabled in the functions in that case.

The input widget as TinyMCE can be equipped with a custom jumpTo picker for the detail page.

Database storage

The text is stored as text NULL (up to 65,535 characters). An empty value is stored as NULL (compatible with MySQL Strict Mode). For longer content, a migration to mediumtext or longtext directly at the database level may be necessary — this is described in the cookbook under Input Mask: Adding More Values to Single Select.