David Greenhalgh
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Auto-Complete is a great tool when it provides possible results BEFORE you finish typing. Unfortunately, using Rails’s included AJAX helpers to query the database as you type often results in a large delay before matches are returned.
However, there is a lightning-quick option: pre-fetch the results in a Javascript array.
In a client project, users can add labels to events on their calendar. To prevent users from creating variations of the same label name (i.e. - “favorite” vs. “favorites”), we needed to provide faster auto-complete functionality than that available through Rails’s provided AJAX helpers.
We created a simple helper method for this case (special thanks to Chad Fowler and his Rails Recipes book for the inspiration).
Take a look at the local_auto_complete_field helper method. TXT (Editor’s note: this is no longer available.)
To call the function from your views:
<br></br> <%= local_auto_complete_field('name',@labels) %><br></br>
In the above example, we are adding JavaScript-powered auto-complete functionality to the 'name' text field. The JavaScript array is generated by calling #name on each element in the @labels array. To override this behavior:
<%= local_auto_complete_field('name',@labels, :method => 'description') %>
Here’s to faster auto-completion!
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David Greenhalgh
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Josh Justice