The Excellence of RadMaskedEditBox

A lot of time passed since my last post , and lot of things have changed and were added to our unique RadControls for WinForms offer. Today, I'd like to direct the spotlight at RadMaskedEditBox for WinForms, which offers some pretty impressive functionality you will find useful in your applications.

While using a text box control for text input and editing is quite familiar, such a component has simplified user interface and poor feature set. However because of the popularity we  implemented the RadTextBox component. When we finished this control, there were voices from the community that said: “Hey we want a text box control with enhancements for optional masked input and formatted input, but we want it to include the feature set of RadTextBox”.
It’s always like this: Whatever the planning and the research regarding the features set of a component, the community folks have ingenious ideas that have slipped past our eyes and ears without being noticed. And what we certainly do here at Telerik is not just listening but hearing our community.
Multiple requests were the reason we’ve started the development of a masked edit control. The first version we released was with two types of editing – Standard and DateTime.  Let me clear a bit what “Standard type” really means:

 When you define an input mask using the Mask property then each character is mapped to a placeholder or a literal (alphabetic or punctual characters) character. Example are the parentheses surrounding the area code of a phone number: (041). This behavior of our mask edit control is called standard because it is the same as it is in the mask box component provided with .NET 2.0.

 The DateTime mask on the other hand ensures that the date entered by the user is verified and accurate. You can also specify the culture information by setting the Culture property of the control. Keyboard support is also included. You can switch between different values in the date by using the arrow keys or typing some numbers. Left, Right arrow keys are moving the focus left or right thus selecting a part of a date (e.g. year). Up, Down
arrow keys are spinning up or down the current selected date part( e.g. If you have currently selected the year and its value is 2008, when you press the up arrow the year value will be changed to 2009).

 I’m happy to announce that in the Q1 release of RadControls for WinForms one more type of editing behavior was added to RadMaskedEditBox. Now users can edit currency, percentage, and numeric (floating-point or decimal) values. This could be done very easily by just specifying the correct mask. Examples for such masks are: ‘f’ – floating-point, ‘p’ – percentage, ‘c’ - currency, etc.

 
That’s all folks for now, but, hey, stay tuned as I will be blogging about the RadDateTimePicker and its dozens of features.