PBS 65 of X — Bootstrap Input Groups

This entry is part 65 of 92 in the series Programming by Stealth

This will be the penultimate instalment of our introduction to Bootstrap forms. Today we’ll be looking at a really useful Bootstrap component for making form inputs clearer for the user, more powerful, and prettier. In the next instalment we’ll finish off with Bootstraps forms for the moment with a look at Boostrap’s built-in form validation features.

You can download this instalmentâ€ s ZIP file here.

Listen Along: CCATP Episode 568
https://media.blubrry.com/nosillacast/traffic.libsyn.com/nosillacast/CCATP_2018_10_20.mp3

PBS 64 Challenge Solution

You’ll find my solution in this instalment’s ZIP file in the folder pbs64-challenge-solution.

The challenge was to add two forms to the recipe we built up over recent instalments. The first was an inline login form.

The markup was very much by-the-book, being basically the same as that in the small form example in the previous instalment:



Admin Login:
Username

Password

Login



The only small extra addition in the challenge was a click handler for the login button:

$(function(){
$('#login_btn').click(function(){
window.alert("Sorry, this is just a dummy form, there's nothing to actually log in to here!");
});
});

The second form was a feedback form, and you were free to use any layout that you felt worked well, as long as it was usable at all breakpoints. I chose to use a horizontal form:


Share via Email


Your Name





Your Email Adddress





Recipient Name





Recipient Email Adddress





Message






Send





To make the form behave well at all breakpoints I simply varied the relative widths of the columns depending on the breakpoint by allowing the column containing the form elements to take all available space, and setting the labels to have specific widths at specific breakpoints with: class="col-sm-5 col-md-4 col-lg-3 col-xl-2 col-form-label".

The click handler was basically the same as the one for the first form.

Bootstrap Input Groups

Bootstrap provides a nice mechanism for enhancing text inputs with little additions. Since text boxes are created with tag, the Bootstrap developers named these components Input Groups. For some bonus confusion, note that you can use tags instead of tags within input groups!

Note that like with most Bootstrap features covered in this series, this won’t be an exhaustive description of every single input group feature, we’ll just be looking at some of the highlights.

Like a button group, an input groups takes the place of a single form element within a form, so it does not replace a Bootstrap form group.

Input groups are contained within an element given the class .input-group. You can use any tag you like for this, but s are most commonly used.

Input Group Text Add-ons

The simplest thing you can use button groups for it to append or prepend a text add-on to one or both sides of a text box or text area. You can do this to give additional context, or, in some instances, to remove the need for a separate visible label. Note that if you do choose to replace a visible label with a text add-on, you still need provide a label for assistive devices. You have the usual three choices for this — a hidden label with the class .sr-only, or either an aria-label or aria-labelledby attribute on the text box itself.

Each add-on should be wrapped in a container with either the class .input-group-prepend or .input-group-append. Again, any tag can be used as this container, but is most commonly used. The actual text within the add-on needs to be further wrapped in a tag with the class .input-group-text. Again, any element can be used, but s are most common.

That sounds more complicated than it is — big-picture you have an input group which contains one or more of a pre-pend add-on, an input, and append add-on. For now, each add-on contains add-on text, but as we’ll see later, they can contain other things too.

This all sounds very complicated, so let’s see some practical examples.

First, you can use a pre-pend to make it clear that you don’t want a user to enter some kind of prefix into the form by providing it for them in an add-on. A great example of this would be a Twitter handle where you could pre-pend the @ symbol to make clear you just want the bit after that:


Twitter Handle



@



If you'd like us to acknowledge your donation with a tweet enter your twitter handle.



The above snippet shows an entire row from within a horizontal Bootstrap form. Note that we still have a tag as normal, and that the form help text is outside of the input group.

This is what this input looks like:

Text inputs can also contain text-based icons like emoji or glyphicons, so we could improve our Twitter input by adding an Twitter icon as an append:



@







The above snippet uses a Font Awesome glyphicon and looks like this:

Another very common way to show context with text add-ons is currency amounts. You can use a pre-pend add-on to show the currency, and an append add-on to show that you want the user to enter just the major part of the amount. For example, here is an input group asking for a Euro amount to the nearest Euro:


Donation



&euro;



.00





You can use a text add-on as a label, but just remember to use the appropriate ARIA attributes to support assistive technologies:





Message






Note that the add-on text was given the ID #message_ta_lbl, and the text area specifies that ID as its label with the aria-labelledby attribute. This is what the text area looks like:

Checkboxes/Radio Buttons as Input Group Add-ons

As mentioned previously, add-ons can be more than just text, the can also contain other related form elements like checkboxes or radio buttons. Rather confusingly, you simply add these extra elements into the .input-group-text element within the add-on.

A great example of why you might want to do this would be on a form where you ask a user for a piece of information that they may or may not want to do something with.

The following input asks the users for a homepage URL, and asks them whether or not to publish it:


Homepage












If you'd like us to include your website when we thank you on the show, please tick the box.



Note the use of the aria-label attribute to give the checkbox a label for assistive devices. This is what the input group looks like:

Multiple Inputs and Add-ons

While you can only have a single prepend or append add-on as such, each of those can actually contain multiple elements. Also, you can have multiple inputs in the same input group. We can improve our URL example by adding a second text add-on after the one that contains the checkbox:



Plug










An example where you might want multiple inputs would be someone’s name:


Names











Note the use of aria-label attributes to give each input an individual label for assistive devices. This is what the input group looks like:

Input Group Selects

You can add a dropdown into your input groups by giving it the class .custom-select.


Frequency



Monthly Contribution
Per-Instalment Contribution
One-off Donation








Note that this is not a standard select, but a bootstrap-special that keeps its colour scheme more in tune with the input group as a whole. The difference is not that striking when the select s collapsed:

But it’s very noticeably when its expanded:

Input Group Buttons

You can also add buttons to input groups by adding them directly into add-ons.

A very common use-case is for search boxes (see example in next section).

Input Group Sizes

Just like with button groups, there are three sizes of input group, small, default, and large. You make an entire input group small by adding the class .input-group-sm to the containing tag, and you make one large by adding .input-group-lg.

As an example, let’s make a simple small search box:








Search Site




Again, note the use of the aria-label attribute to label the text box for assistive technologies. This is what the entire form looks like:

Challenge

Using your own solution to the previous challenge, or mine, improve both forms on the page using Bootstrap Input Groups.

Final Thoughts

We’re now almost done with our introduction to forms in Bootstrap. We can take input from users in all sorts of very powerful and pretty ways, and we can lay out our forms in many and varied ways. What we haven’t learned how to do in a Bootstrap-way is validate our forms, so that’s what we’ll be looking at next time.