Glenn,
I don’t believe you can do this declaratively. Instead, I think it’s the perfect place to use a custom field renderer (that links to a table’s custom field renderer example, but it’s a similar principle for a field in a field editor). A start for the field renderer snippet might be something like
var field = arguments[0], value = arguments[1], $ = skuid.$;<br />if (field.mode == 'read') {<br /> //custom code here<br />} else if (field.mode == 'edit') {<br /> skuid.ui.fieldRenderers.TEXTAREA.edit(field,value);<br />}
Here’s the documentation for a field of type TEXTAREA. You might also find this community post helpful, although the situation is different from yours.
