Bootstrap full-width text-input within inline-form

Question

I am struggling to create a textbox that fits the entire width of my container area.

<div class="row">
    <div class="col-md-12">
        <form class="form-inline" role="form">           
                <input type="text" class="form-control input-lg" id="search-church" placeholder="Your location (City, State, ZIP)">
                <button type="submit" class="btn btn-lg">Search</button>            
        </form>
    </div>
</div>

When I do the above, the two form elements are in-line, as I expect, but don't take up more than a few columns, at best. Hovering over the col-md-12 div in firebug shows it taking up the expected full width. It's just the text input that doesn't seem to fill. I even tried adding an in-line width value but it didn't change anything. I know this should be simple, just feeling really dumb now.

Here is a fiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/52VtD/4119/embedded/result/

EDIT:

The selected answer is thorough in every way and a wonderful help. It's what I ended up using. However I think my initial issue was actually a problem with the default MVC5 template within Visual Studio 2013. It contained this in Site.css:

input,
select,
textarea {
    max-width: 280px;
}

Obviously that was blocking the text-input from expanding appropriately... Fair warning to future ASP.NET template users...

Answer 1

The bootstrap docs says about this:

Requires custom widths Inputs, selects, and textareas are 100% wide by default in Bootstrap. To use the inline form, you'll have to set a width on the form controls used within.

The default width of 100% as all form elements gets when they got the class form-control didn't apply if you use the form-inline class on your form.

You could take a look at the bootstrap.css (or .less, whatever you prefer) where you will find this part:

.form-inline {

  // Kick in the inline
  @media (min-width: @screen-sm-min) {
    // Inline-block all the things for "inline"
    .form-group {
      display: inline-block;
      margin-bottom: 0;
      vertical-align: middle;
    }

    // In navbar-form, allow folks to *not* use `.form-group`
    .form-control {
      display: inline-block;
      width: auto; // Prevent labels from stacking above inputs in `.form-group`
      vertical-align: middle;
    }
    // Input groups need that 100% width though
    .input-group > .form-control {
      width: 100%;
    }

    [...]
  }
}

Maybe you should take a look at input-groups, since I guess they have exactly the markup you want to use (working fiddle here):

<div class="row">
   <div class="col-lg-12">
    <div class="input-group input-group-lg">
      <input type="text" class="form-control input-lg" id="search-church" placeholder="Your location (City, State, ZIP)">
      <span class="input-group-btn">
        <button class="btn btn-default btn-lg" type="submit">Search</button>
      </span>
    </div>
  </div>
</div>