Autocompleter.Base

Autocompleter.Base handles all the autocompletion functionality that’s independent of the data source for autocompletion. This includes drawing the autocompletion menu, observing keyboard and mouse events, and similar.

Availability

script.aculo.us V1.1b1

Extending

Specific autocompleters need to provide, at the very least, a getUpdatedChoices function that will be invoked every time the text inside the monitored textbox changes. This method should get the text for which to provide autocompletion by invoking this.getToken(), NOT by directly accessing this.element.value. This is to allow incremental tokenized autocompletion. Specific auto-completion logic (AJAX, etc) belongs in getUpdatedChoices.

Tokenized autocompletion

Tokenized incremental autocompletion is enabled automatically when an autocompleter is instantiated with the 'tokens' option in the options parameter:

new Ajax.Autocompleter('id','upd', '/url/', { tokens: ',' });

will incrementally autocomplete with a comma as the token.

The ',' in the above example can be replaced with an array, e.g. { tokens: [',', '\n'] } which enables autocompletion on multiple tokens. This is most useful when one of the tokens is \n (a newline), as it allows smart autocompletion after linebreaks.