Question

I am trying to implement an auto complete feature similar to facebook city selector where one enters the city name and the autocomplete appears in the form “city, state, country”.
I have dbs of cities states and countries
I followed the railscast auto complete video.
My code is as follows

Cities controller

def index
  @cities = City.order(:name).where("lower(name) like ?", "%#{params[:term].downcase}%")
  render json: @cities.map(&:name) 
end

User.js.coffee

jQuery ->

 $('#user_city_name').autocomplete
 source: $('#user_city_name').data('autocomplete-source')

users/new/html.erb

<div class="field">
 <%= f.label :city_name %><br />
 <%= f.text_field :city_name, data: {autocomplete_source: cities_path}   %>
</div>

the city is all that needs to be auto selected but I would like when the user is selecting that they see the auto select option as city, state, country because there are a lot of cities with the same name in different states. can anyone point me in the right direction plz and thank you

Answer 1

I figured out how to do it. Changed the cities controller index to

def index
  if params[:term]
    @cities = City.order(:name).where("lower(name) like ?", "%#{params[:term].downcase}%").includes(:state)
    cities_list = @cities.map {|city| Hash[id: city.id, label: "#{city.name}, #{city.state.name}, #{city.state.country.name}", value: city.name]}
    render json: cities_list
  else
    @cities = City.all
  end

end