Autocomplete select dropdown

YUI Autocomplete AJAX Select Drowdown with ID
Posted in Pylons, Mako, JavaScript by thejimmyg on the October 19th, 2007
The YUI toolkit comes with a very flexible autocomplete control but a common requirement is for an autocomplete control that submits the ID associated with a text value rather than the text value itself, much like a select field submits the option value, not the contents the user selects from a drop down list.

Luckily this is fairly easy to achieve using a forceSelection option, a hidden field, and a custom itemSelectEvent handler.

First setup the imports as described on the YUI AutoComplete page:

























Now let’s set up the data structure in a Pylons controller action which the YUI component will access to populate the find as you type select dropdown. You could write similar code for Rails or PHP, it doesn’t have to be Pylons. Notice that the @jsonify decorator converts the Python data structure we return to valid JSON:

@jsonify
def get_data(self):
return {
"ResultSet": {
"totalResultsAvailable":"100",
"totalResultsReturned":2,
"firstResultPosition":1,
"Result": [
{
"ID": "897",
"Title":"foo",
"Summary":"... When foo' is used in connection with bar' it has generally traced...",
"Url":"http:\/\/www.catb.org\/~esr\/jargon\/html\/F\/foo.html",
"ModificationDate":1072684800,
"MimeType":"text\/html"
},
{
"ID": "492",
"Title":"Foo Fighters",
"Summary":"Official site with news, tour dates, discography, store, community, and more.",
"Url":"http:\/\/www.foofighters.com\/",
"ModificationDate":1138521600,
"MimeType":"text\/html"
}
]
}
}
Now we need to write the code to generate the autocomplete control. YUI uses an existing text field as the autocomplete field and this will contain whatever text is looked up. Our application requires the corresponding ID so we need a hidden field to hold that value. The hidden field should have the name you want the ID to be submitted as, the text field can have any name because it doesn’t contain the data the application needs. YUI also needs a container

which it populates with the results. Ours is called myContainer.

Here’s some HTML to achive this:

Sponsor Name

Now let’s add some JavaScript. This can go after the HTML above:




The first line sets up a schema, the first item of which specifies where the actual results are in the data structrue returned (in this case they are in the Result list of the ResultSet dictionary), the subsequent entries specify values within each result which might be displayed in the control.

Test this example by entering foo into the field. It works as expected returning two options and allowing you to select one but the hidden myInput_id field doesn’t get populated.


To populate the hidden field we need to create a callback function and subscribe it to the autocomplete control’s itemSelectEvent. Add the following code at the end of the JavaScript above, just before the script tag:

function fnCallback(e, args) {
YAHOO.util.Dom.get("myInput_id").value = args[2][1];
}
myAutoComp.itemSelectEvent.subscribe(fnCallback);
Now, when an item is selected from the autocomplete control, fnCallback gets called with two arguments. The first is an event object e and the second is a list of arguments described here. These are:

oSelf
The AutoComplete instance.
elItem
The selected

element item.
oData

Reference: http://jimmyg.org/2007/10/19/yui-autocomplete-ajax-select-drowdown-with-id/