Auto growing textarea in ionic

The answer above does not shrink - here is an improved version:

https://codepen.io/benshope/pen/xOPvpm

angular.module('app').directive('expandingTextarea', function () {
    return {
        restrict: 'A',
        controller: function ($scope, $element, $attrs, $timeout) {
            $element.css('min-height', '0');
            $element.css('resize', 'none');
            $element.css('overflow-y', 'hidden');
            setHeight(0);
            $timeout(setHeightToScrollHeight);

            function setHeight(height) {
                $element.css('height', height + 'px');
                $element.css('max-height', height + 'px');
            }

            function setHeightToScrollHeight() {
                setHeight(0);
                var scrollHeight = angular.element($element)[0]
                  .scrollHeight;
                if (scrollHeight !== undefined) {
                    setHeight(scrollHeight);
                }
            }

            $scope.$watch(function () {
                return angular.element($element)[0].value;
            }, setHeightToScrollHeight);
        }
    };
});

This will transform all your textareas to grow/shrink.

Hope that helps!


I wrote a very simple directive that works with Ionic 2 and ion-textarea. Here it is:

import { Directive, HostListener, ElementRef } from "@angular/core";

@Directive({
selector: "ion-textarea[autoresize]" // Attribute selector
})
export class Autoresize {
  @HostListener("input", ["$event.target"])
  onInput(textArea: HTMLTextAreaElement): void {
    this.adjust();
  }

  constructor(public element: ElementRef) {
  }

  ngOnInit(): void {
    this.adjust();
  }

  adjust(): void {
    let ta = this.element.nativeElement.querySelector("textarea");
    ta.style.overflow = "hidden";
    ta.style.height = "auto";
    ta.style.height = ta.scrollHeight + "px";
  }
}

Here is a gist: https://gist.github.com/maxt3r/2485356e91a1969bdb6cf54902e61165

EDIT: Look at the gist for other suggestions from other people.


I found a much more better way to do this without using any other third party library or directive.

$scope.updateEditor = function() {
    var element = document.getElementById("page_content");
    element.style.height = element.scrollHeight + "px";
};

Then simply adding ng-keypress="updateEditor()" to the textarea would do the job.

<textarea ng-keypress="updateEditor()" ng-model="bar"> </textarea>

I Hope this helps others who might face this problem in the future.

Update: Here is a codepen for this: http://codepen.io/kpourdeilami/pen/KDepk

Update 2: Use the snippet provided by @benshope

Update 3: If you're on Ionic/Angular 2, use the answer provided by "Max Al Farakh"