Creating TextArea with auto-growing height

30.01.2024 — react, html — 1 min read

In building user-friendly React applications, providing seamless interactions with forms is crucial. Textareas often play a central role in capturing user input, and ensuring a smooth experience involves addressing their dynamic nature.

Enter the Auto-Growing textarea

Imagine a scenario where a user begins typing within a textarea, only to discover the available space insufficient for their content. Manually adjusting the height can disrupt their flow. This is where auto-growing textareas step in, automatically expanding as users type, eliminating the need for manual adjustments.

Implementation in React

Here's the code example on implementing an auto-growing textarea in React using the onChange event handler and scrollHeight property:

const FormField = ({ field, fieldConfig }) => {
  const handleOnChange = (event) => {
    event.target.style.height = 'inherit';
    event.target.style.height = `${event.target.scrollHeight}px`;
};

return (
  <label>
    {fieldConfig.label}
    <textarea {...field} 
      onChange={handleOnChange} 
      style={{ height: 'auto', overflow: 'auto' }} 
    />
  </label>
);

Key Points:

The onChange handler tracks content changes and adjusts height accordingly.
scrollHeight reflects the content's actual height, ensuring accurate resizing.

This simple technique significantly improves user experience by eliminating the need for manual height adjustments, creating a smoother and more intuitive interaction with textareas in your React applications.