How do I configure a TextBox control to automatically resize itself vertically when text no longer fits on one line?

Question

How do I configure a TextBox control to automatically resize itself vertically when text no longer fits on one line?

For example, in the following XAML:

<DockPanel LastChildFill="True" Margin="0,0,0,0">
  <Border Name="dataGridHeader" 
    DataContext="{Binding Descriptor.Filter}"
    DockPanel.Dock="Top"                         
    BorderThickness="1"
    Style="{StaticResource ChamelionBorder}">
  <Border
    Padding="5"
    BorderThickness="1,1,0,0"                            
    BorderBrush="{DynamicResource {ComponentResourceKey TypeInTargetAssembly=dc:NavigationPane, 
    ResourceId={x:Static dc:NavigationPaneColors.NavPaneTitleBorder}}}">
    <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal">
      <TextBlock                                
        Name="DataGridTitle"                                                                                                
        FontSize="14"
        FontWeight="Bold"                                    
        Foreground="{DynamicResource {ComponentResourceKey 
        TypeInTargetAssembly=dc:NavigationPane, 
        ResourceId={x:Static dc:NavigationPaneColors.NavPaneTitleForeground}}}"/>
      <StackPanel Margin="5,0"  Orientation="Horizontal" 
              Visibility="{Binding IsFilterEnabled, FallbackValue=Collapsed, Mode=OneWay, Converter={StaticResource BooleanToVisibility}}"
              IsEnabled="{Binding IsFilterEnabled, FallbackValue=false}"  >                                    
          <TextBlock  />                                                                
          <TextBox    
            Name="VerticallyExpandMe"
            Padding="0, 0, 0, 0"  
            Margin="10,2,10,-1"                                                                                                                                                                                                                     
            AcceptsReturn="True"
            VerticalAlignment="Center"                                    
            Text="{Binding QueryString}"
            Foreground="{DynamicResource {ComponentResourceKey 
            TypeInTargetAssembly=dc:NavigationPane, 
            ResourceId={x:Static dc:NavigationPaneColors.NavPaneTitleForeground}}}">
          </TextBox>
        </StackPanel>                               
    </StackPanel>
  </Border>              
  </Border>
</DockPanel>

The TextBox control named "VerticallyExpandMe" needs to automatically expand vertically when the text bound to it does not fit on one line. With AcceptsReturn set to true, TextBox expands vertically if I press enter within it, but I want it do do this automatically.

Answer 1

Although Andre Luus's suggestion is basically correct, it won't actually work here, because your layout will defeat text wrapping. I'll explain why.

Fundamentally, the problem is this: text wrapping only does anything when an element's width is constrained, but your TextBox has unconstrained width because it's a descendant of a horizontal StackPanel. (Well, two horizontal stack panels. Possibly more, depending on the context from which you took your example.) Since the width is unconstrained, the TextBox has no idea when it is supposed to start wrapping, and so it will never wrap, even if you enable wrapping. You need to do two things: constrain its width and enable wrapping.

Here's a more detailed explanation.

Your example contains a lot of detail irrelevant to the problem. Here's a version I've trimmed down somewhat to make it easier to explain what's wrong:

<StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal">
    <TextBlock Name="DataGridTitle" />
    <StackPanel
        Margin="5,0"
        Orientation="Horizontal"
        >
        <TextBlock />
        <TextBox
            Name="VerticallyExpandMe"
            Margin="10,2,10,-1"
            AcceptsReturn="True"
            VerticalAlignment="Center"
            Text="{Binding QueryString}"
            >
        </TextBox>
    </StackPanel>
</StackPanel>

So I've removed your containing DockPanel and the two nested Border elements inside of that, because they're neither part of the problem nor relevant to the solution. So I'm starting at the pair of nested StackPanel elements in your example. And I've also removed most of the attributes because most of them are also not relevant to the layout.

This looks a bit weird - having two nested horizontal stack panels like this looks redundant, but it does actually make sense in your original if you need to make the nested one visible or invisible at runtime. But it makes it easier to see the problem.

(The empty TextBlock tag is also weird, but that's exactly as it appears in your original. That doesn't appear to be doing anything useful.)

And here's the problem: your TextBox is inside some horizontal StackPanel elements, meaning its width is unconstrained - you have inadvertently told the text box that it is free to grow to any width, regardless of how much space is actually available.

A StackPanel will always perform layout that is unconstrained in the direction of stacking. So when it comes to lay out that TextBox, it'll pass in a horizontal size of double.PositiveInfinity to the TextBox. So the TextBox will always think it has more space than it needs. Moreover, when a child of a StackPanel asks for more space than is actually available, the StackPanel lies, and pretends to give it that much space, but then crops it.

(This is the price you pay for the extreme simplicity of StackPanel - it's simple to the point of being bone-headed, because it will happily construct layouts that don't actually fit. You should only use StackPanel if either you really do have unlimited space because you're inside a ScrollViewer, or you are certain that you have sufficiently few items that you're not going to run out of space, or if you don't care about items running off the end of the panel when they get too large and you don't want the layout system to try to do anything more clever than simply cropping the content.)

So turning on text wrapping won't help here, because the StackPanel will always pretend that there's more than enough space for the text.

You need a different layout structure. Stack panels are the wrong thing to use because they will not impose the layout constraint you need to get text wrapping to kick in.

Here's a simple example that does roughly what you want:

<Grid VerticalAlignment="Top">
    <DockPanel>
        <TextBlock
            x:Name="DataGridTitle"
            VerticalAlignment="Top"
            DockPanel.Dock="Left"
            />
        <TextBox
            Name="VerticallyExpandMe"
            AcceptsReturn="True"
            TextWrapping="Wrap"
            Text="{Binding QueryString}"
            >
        </TextBox>
    </DockPanel>
</Grid>

If you create a brand new WPF application and paste that in as the content of the main window, you should find it does what you want - the TextBox starts out one line tall, fills the available width, and if you type text in, it'll grow one line at a time as you add more text.

Of course, layout behaviour is always sensitive to context, so it may not be enough to just throw that into the middle of your existing application. That will work if pasted into a fixed-size space (e.g. as the body of a window), but will not work correctly if you paste it into a context where width is unconstrained. (E.g., inside a ScrollViewer, or inside a horizontal StackPanel.)

So if this doesn't work for you, it'll be because of other things wrong elsewhere in your layout - possibly yet more StackPanel elements elsewhere. From the look of your example, it's probably worth spending some time thinking about what you really need in your layout and simplifying it - the presence of negative margins, and elements that don't appear to do anything like that empty TextBlock are usually indicative of an over-complicated layout. And unnecessary complexity in a layout makes it much hard to achieve the effects you're looking for.