I'm trying to replace a MS AJAX.NET autocomplete control with something a bit lighter and more cache-and-compress friendly and I really love how smoothly the Autocomplete plug-in generally works (http://bassistance.de/jquery-plugins/jquery-plugin-autocomplete/). I had to change a couple of things to make it work with our JSON-service- based design:
1) Our application is using web services serialized to JSON and it's working great up until the autocomplete. You can read about the general methodology thanks to Dave over at http://encosia.com/2008/03/27/using-jquery-to-consume-aspnet-json-web-services/. To get around that for proof-of-concept purposes, I went into Autocompleter.request and replaced the existing AJAX call with $.ajax({ type: "POST", url: "ajaxProxy.asmx/TagAutocomplete", data: '{ "prefixText" : "' + lastWord(term) + '", "count" : ' + options.max + '}', contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8", dataType: "json", success: function(msg) { var mashed = options.parse && options.parse (msg.d) || parse(msg.d); cache.add(term, mashed); success(term, mashed); } }); and altered parse() to just take an array instead of a delimited string (var rows = data; // = data.split("\n");). Now we're currently just returning an array of strings, so this is no problem for us (so long as a user doesn't stick a | or " in terms, though that can likely be modded out as well). Question at this point: Is there a simpler way to get the same JSON callback out of Autocomplete? If not, given the above, can it be added to the official source? 2) Given the above, there was an odd behavior in starting a new term in a multiple-term box -- toss in a ", " and the correct form of the previous term shows up ready to be auto-completed. I fixed that by eliminating the "0-character word" check (//if ($.trim(value))) in trimWords such that an empty string can go into the array. It was a quick fix, but I'm not sure how solid -- the core symptom appears to be that lastWord is treating a 0-length word as not a word and instead skipping to the previous word when onChange is figuring out what to suggest autocompletes. Question at this point: Did I find a bug? If so, is eliminating that length-check when making an array of terms the most effective way of dealing with it? If so, is this something that will be patched in the near future? Thanks!
