Question

I have a website where a user can send out emails from. I have kind of mimics basic form with:

To: <Text Input>
Subject:<Text Input>
Attachments: <Button> <Text Input>
Body <input text>

I have a list of email address in a database table and it’s easy for me to retrieve this. I am trying to find the slickest way to support the following use cases:

1. Allow users to send email to everyone in list.
2. Allow users to select specific members of group

What would be a good way to do this? Do some code samples exist?

One way I thought of is to mimic Gmail when you can just start typing and it will do an inline search for emails in the list. I guess I would have a separate button to “Select All” users in this case.

That is just one idea. I am open to suggestions.

Answer 1

The jQuery plugin I referenced in my answer below has been replaced by a jQuery UI component.

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I’d definitely recommend the autocomplete approach. Something like this jQuery plugin would be a good start. You’d need to modify the code to treat commas as a trigger for a new autocomplete search though.

As for the all members, yup, an “All Members” checkbox seems the most straightforward. If you wanted, you could also include keyword triggers in your To field processing so that words like “All” or “Everyone” would be equivalent to selecting the checkbox.

Edit: jQuery is one step ahead of me and the autocomplete plugin already supports multiple entries:

$("#suggest3").autocomplete(cities, {
    multiple: true,
    mustMatch: true,
    autoFill: true
});