Question

I had a similar problem a few months ago, but that was easily solved because I was working on an MVC application. I’m working on an old webforms application at the moment.

I can see the proper results coming back in a debugger, but nothing is getting displayed in my textbox. I must not be formatting the results properly. This is difficult, because WebForms doesn’t have a built-in serializer for JSON (to my knowledge). So instead, I’m returning pipe-delimited content, and then splitting it on return.

My javascript…

function myAutoComplete(myTextBox, myLabel, myHiddenVar) {
$(myTextBox).autocomplete({
    source: function (request, response) {
        $.ajax({
            type: 'POST',
            dataType: 'json',
            url: "myAutoCompletePage.aspx?q=" + request.term +
                "&mySearchType=" + $(myLabel).html(),
                success: function (data) {

                    response($.map(data, function (item) {
                        var result = item.split("|");
                        return { label: result[0], value: result[0], id: result[1] }
                    }));
                 }
            });
        },
        select: function (event, ui) {
            $(myTextBox).val(ui.item.name);
            $(myHiddenVar).val(ui.item.id);
            return false;
        }
    });
}

My code-behind…

foreach (DataRow myDataRow in myDataTable.Rows)
{
    Response.Write(myDataRow[0].ToString() + "|" + myDataRow[1].ToString() + Environment.NewLine);
}
Response.End();

Answer 1

You should use (your response is not valid JSON) :

$.ajax({dataType: 'text'})