Question

I am using jQuery.autocomplete(1.02) on my search box and I want exact string and substring matching. I don’t care (yet!) about the database load, I’m happy for it to fire off a query every keystroke and bypass the caching entirely – I just don’t want anything missed.

To this end I have tried setting cacheLength=1, the minimum permitted, but the autocomplete function refuses to fire off a GET request for each key up.

searchbox          GET_request     'a'       ->    http://localhost/service_search_request?q=a    'ar'      ->    http://localhost/service_search_request?q=ar    'ars'     ->    http://localhost/service_search_request?q=ars 

Instead, it sends the first and the third and misses the second, giving me the wrong results for ‘ar’ :-/ I’ve cleared my cache and sessions but it looks like some sort of caching is still going on. AFAIK I have no proxying going on and I’m shift-refreshing each time. It looks likely then that this behavior is from jQuery.autocomplete itself.

So my questions are…

A) Does this seem likely? i.e. is it a feature, or maybe a bug?

B) If so is there a clean way around it?…

C) If not, what autocomplete would you use instead?

Naturally D) No you’re just using it incorrectly you douche! is always a possibility, and indeed the one I’d prefer having spent time going down this road – assuming it comes with a link to the docs I’ve failed to find / read!

Cheers,

Roger 🙂

Answer 1

I wonder why cacheLength doesn’t work, but had trouble with autocomplete too. IMHO, there are errors in it. However, in the list of options, there is a matchSubset you could set to false.

EDIT: somewhere around line 335 is a function called ‘request’. You could add some debug messages to it, to see what happens: (note: you need firebug installed or ‘console’ will be unknown)

function request(term, success, failure) {      console.debug('ac request...');      if (!options.matchCase)         term = term.toLowerCase();      var data = cache.load(term);      console.debug('ac request 1, loaded data from cache: ' + data + ' term: ' + term);      // recieve the cached data     if (data && data.length) {         success(term, data);     // if an AJAX url has been supplied, try loading the data now     } else if( (typeof options.url == 'string') && (options.url.length > 0) ){          console.debug('ac request 2, data is not in the cache, request it'); 

‘flushCache’ can easily be used in the function you can attach / set as options. I used this, to clear the Cache, if there could be more data in the backend:

formatItem: function (data,i,n,value){     if(i === (this.max -1)){         console.debug('flushCache');         jQuery(this).flushCache();     }      return data[1] + ' (' + data[0] + ')'; }