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I am wondering how to style the fields in a form for users that have read-only access.

As per the Material Design guidelines, read-only fields should have a help text stating they are read-only. However, in case of a situation where the whole form is read-only, how should I style the text fields?

Should I use a disabled field style? Should I remove the outlined borders? (I am using outlined type of Material Design fields).

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Usually, you do use the disabled state of an input field to show that the content cannot be edited. However, if the entire form consists of disabled fields, you may end up confusing users about the purpose of the form. Why can they not edit the fields? Is there a scenario where they can?

If you want to show a pre-filled form with no possibility to edit its contents, it's clearer to a user to simply show the label and the input as text (so no outline). This shows a more 'definite' state of the form, similar to how a printed form looks.

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  • Thank you for the reply Wanda. I drafted two solutions and indeed having the form full of disabled fields makes it hard to read so I think Ill go with just text without outline.
    – lonant
    Commented Apr 16, 2019 at 11:19

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