TcxCustomMaskEditProperties.AlwaysShowBlanksAndLiterals Property

Specifies whether the editor’s display value includes blank and literal characters when the editor is not focused.

Declaration

property AlwaysShowBlanksAndLiterals: Boolean read; write; default False;

Property Value

Type	Default
Boolean	False

Remarks

When an editor uses a standard mask, you can use the AlwaysShowBlanksAndLiterals property to specify whether blank and literal characters should be displayed when the editor is not focused. Blank characters are placeholders for character input. Literal characters are included into the mask into fixed positions to enhance input convenience and value readability. An example of literal characters is the day, month and year delimiter in a date mask.

Note that literal characters included into the mask can be included into the editor’s value. This takes place if the mask includes the 1 flag separated from the mask pattern by a semicolon (at design-time, you can switch this flag using the Save literal characters check box within the mask editor). If this flag is set, literal characters are not hidden regardless of the AlwaysShowBlanksAndLiterals property value.

Note that setting the AlwaysShowBlanksAndLiterals property value to True is useful for in-place editors that are bound to fields whose values are edited using masks but literal characters are not stored. The image below shows an example for a column displaying phones. The AlwaysShowBlanksAndLiterals property is set to False and True respectively.

The default value of the AlwaysShowBlanksAndLiterals property is False.