Question

I am referring to this plugin: http://jqueryui.com/demos/autocomplete/

So the original structure for the results is

<ul class="ui-autocomplete ui-menu ui-widget ui-widget-content ui-corner-all">
  <li class="ui-menu-item">
    <a class="ui-corner-all">item 1</a>
  </li>
  <li class="ui-menu-item">
    <a class="ui-corner-all">item 2</a>
  </li>
  <li class="ui-menu-item">
    <a class="ui-corner-all">item 3</a>
  </li>
</ul>

I need to make the links inside to look something like this:

<a class="myclass" customattribute="something"> The item </a>

Please don’t tell me the only solution it to edit the plugin because i don’t want the same format for all autocompletes on the site.

Answer 1

You need to replace the _renderItem method (for the autocomplete in question):

$("selector").autocomplete({ ... })
   .data( "autocomplete" )._renderItem = function( ul, item ) {
        return $( "<li></li>" )
            .data( "item.autocomplete", item )
            .append( "<a class='myclass' customattribute='" + item.customattribute + "'>" + item.label + "</a>" )
            .appendTo( ul );
   };

(assuming the items in your source have a property called customattribute)

As shown in this example: http://jqueryui.com/demos/autocomplete/#custom-data