It would be nice if the autocomplete plugin accepted a function that retrieved the data on behalf of the plugin instead of being stuck with either static data or a relatively inflexible canned ajax request.
$("#example").autocomplete(function (term, success, failure) { /* do custom method for retrieving data */ }); This seems like it would be fairly easy to do. Simply making the request function an option would probably suffice. I will probably hack this up this afternoon and have a patch for it if anyone wants it. :)