I have a DetailsView that I converted from a FormView. Looks great and a lot less code but I have't been able to set the width of a Textbox.  Only part of the text is shown, I'd like to make more visible.  My templated dropdown is okay because I have set the width. 

 I've tried the

BoundField ItemWidth, the DetailsView's Row-Style-Width, the Basic CSS's

.PrettyDetailsView span.AspNet-DetailsView-Value.  Still no luck.

What am I missing? Do I need to use templates for every field that I need to widen?

Thanks

You mentioned having tried several things.  I would encourage you to focus exclusively on the last one, wherein you tried to modify a CSS rule having to do with AspNet-DetailsView-Value.  That's a good start... but you need to refine you approach a little.

If I understand correctly, you want to directly control the width of the textbox that is showing the value some field you bound to.  Presumably, this is when you are in the "edit" mode for the DetailsView.  If you look at the HTML source code for the page I think you'll find that there is a <span> whose class is AspNet-DetailsView-Value and inside of it there is an <input> tag that is the textbox whose width you said you want to adjust.  Right?

If so then the CSS rule's selector (the thing that identifies what part of the DOM the rule applies to) must zero in on the <input> tag itself.  If your <asp:DetailsView> has a CssSelectorClass value of PrettyDetailsView then the CSS rule for the textbox would be something like:

.PrettyDetailsView span.AspNet-DetailsView-Value input
{
    width: 50em;
}

Of course the exact value for the width would be whatever you think is right, 50em is just an placeholder value.

Would you give this a try and let me know what happens? There's lots of cool info on most of web search engines about more of the ways that you can tailor your CSS rules' selectors (the part before the first brace) so the rule only impacts the elements of your page that you are interested in.  Try searching around for: CSS selector syntax

Good luck and happy new year!

That did it, thank you.  I'm still stumbling around CSS.  I thought that I had tried exactly that although my last stab had

.PrettyDetailsView span.AspNet-DetailsView-Value.input not

.PrettyDetailsView span.AspNet-DetailsView-Value input

Unfortunately this has another affect, my checkbox is now centered (appears to be centered) rather than left aligned as before (in both edit and non-edit mode). Oh, I thought this would be easy to fix, but all alignment keywords in the CSS or ASP:CheckBox failed - after all the text fields weren't center.  Well some of the last hairs off the top of my head are now gone, and if I force that item by ID to have width of 1em, it is now left aligned aligned. Seems draconian but it works! Thanks for the Google path ( http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/selector.html ) inspired me to try to mug it by ID.

Thanks again for you timely help.