Question

I have a string of values separated by a space that I return to the Jquery call, but it does not separate the words into rows. Should the data be returned as a string or a list or something else?

Answer 1

By default it wants the results separated by newlines. If you supply a list of values separated by spaces you’ll want to provide a parse function that will take the returned data and turn it into an array. The same is true if you supply a list of values instead.

Here’s a sample from a project I’m working on that returns a list of strings via JSON from an MVC action.

$('#eventName').autocomplete( '<%= Url.Action('SearchEvent', 'Donor' ) %>', {     dataType: 'json',     formatItem: function(data,i,max,value,term){        return value;     },     parse: function(data){         var array = new Array();         for(var i=0;i<data.length;i++)         {             array[array.length] = { data: data[i], value: data[i], result: data[i] };         }         return array;    } });