Autocomplete web form fields?

[RichKeller_com]

Hi, i have a web app with 2500 records, has anyone figured out if we can do a jquery autocomplete type method with a web app search field?

Thereis a wayto do it locally, but will 2500 possible  items, doing this many on page would be code bloating,

[Liam Dilley]

Hey there.
Do you mean when your typing search to have the items show up in quick search?

The correct way has a javascript and server side element which you can not do.

To simulate it you have your list backup or list on a page not indexed or seen and you look up into that and match and show the results. Works but its not ideal as its heavy scripting.

Is your name Rich by the way?

[mario_gudelj]

Hi Rich,

I re-read this couple of times but I'm not quite sure what exactly you want to achieve. Do you want to have a web app search form on the page and when someone starts typing something into Keywords field you want to display some suggestions from the web app item names for them to select? is this the requirement?

If so, I don't really know how you'd do it. You can not make Ajax requests to the server as they're typing. The only thing I can think of is if you were to use back-up layout to construct a json object from all the web app items you pull in and then use jQuery to search and parse it, but the limit of web app items you can have on a page is 500, so this may not work for you.

Maybe someone from the community knows how you can achieve this, but I dont think you can.

Cheers,

-mario

[RichKeller_com]

Yes, for example, i have a web app that mirrors my classifications, 500+ i would like to have a search form that as the user types, it suggests matches based off the full list, as there are hundreds of categories,  much like how in the site admin, when you search for web app items, it provides an instant dropdown of matches, so it helps the user select an actual record that exists, helping them search by, I could see uses on any field really.

I have never used or even read up on the api, so I wondered if the api is something that could be used to do the lookup.

there is a jquery script that can do it manually if i build a hidden list right on the page, so i will try that, but with so many categories, yikes! haha

[Liam Dilley · Accepted solution]

Hi Rich, Me and Mario (he must of not read my post or typing as I posted) are on the same wave length.

It is something you can not do with API or do same page.

As we both mentioned if you have a page which is just the web app date (no styles, just the layout you need) and you create a jquery look up and ajax load the content into  your quick search dropdown you build. The content wont be on the page this way and only fetched when the search field is being typed into.

[RichKeller_com]

Yes, no i would have to manually create a static list that jquery can lookup, while not ideal as is not live data, its strictly static.

Here is an example,

http://jqueryui.com/demos/autocomplete/

again, this rocks when you can use alive dataset, but can be done with a static list of options, the trick is to make sure the static list always mirrors whats in the web app, or searches won't have any results,