EditorGUILayout.TextField returning empty string

Questions & Answers
1

Trying to detect typing into a text field for an editor extension, but it returns an empty string sometimes which makes it really hard to detect when the text field is empty:

private void OnGUI()
{
    var itemName = EditorGUILayout.TextField("Item Name", "");
    Debug.Log(itemName);
}

This outputs the typed input correctly but then the method gets called another four times and the itemName is empty.

When typing “asdf” for example, console output looks like:

asdf
-empty line-
-empty line-
-empty line-
-empty line-

What am I missing?

3

private string itemName;

private void OnGUI()
{
    itemName = EditorGUILayout.TextField("Item Name", itemName);
    Debug.Log(itemName);
}
2

The problem is that you are declaring itemName inside OnGUI, so it’s discarded the instant OnGUI ends. It needs to be a global variable.

4

Are you doing this in an actual editor GUI window or in a game window? If I do this in a script attached to a normal game object and run I get the same behavior. Are you sure you don’t want GUILayout.TextField instead of EditorGUILayout.TextField?

And as Eric said, you also need to declare itemName in the class or globally rather than locally in the function, e.g…

public class TriggerTest : MonoBehaviour {

string itemName = "";

void OnGUI()
{
    itemName = GUILayout.TextField(itemName);
}

}

Otherwise you’ll lose the value each time OnGUI is called.