Question

I am using a jQuery plugin Tag-it to autocomplete the tags in the form input field. The plugin loads the available tags stored in an array.

$("#mytags").tagit({
    availableTags: ["c++", "java", "php", "javascript", "ruby", "python", "c"]
});

I copied following function from the plugin’s javascript code, I believe it is main function to load tags:

tag_input.autocomplete({
            source: options.availableTags, 
            select: function(event,ui){
                if (is_new (ui.item.value)) {
                    create_choice (ui.item.value);
                }
                // Cleaning the input.
                tag_input.val("");

                // Preventing the tag input to be update with the chosen value.
                return false;
            }
        });

The plugin works fine and autocomplete the tags from the availableTags array, however I would like to make a small change in it.
Instead of loading the tags from the array, I would like to load tags from mySQL database table. The table has following structure:

tags:

tag_id      tag_name
1            c++
2            java
3            php
4            javascript
5            ruby

So How can I autoload the tag names from the database (using PHP) instead of loading from the above array? Thanks.

Answer 1

Yes you can like:

Instead of

source: options.availableTags

use this:

source: function(request, response) {
    var term = request.term // This will hold the text you typed in autocomplete
    $.get(url, data, function(data){
        // Build an array to return
        var dataToReturn = [];
    });
    response(dataToReturn);
}