Question

I have the following script using the jQueryUI autocomplete widget. It calls some function whenever a menu item in the selection box is being selected:

<script type="text/javascript">
    $(function() {
        $( "#tags" ).autocomplete({
            source: [ "ActionScript", "AppleScript", "Asp"],
            select: function() { 
                console.log("Element has been selected");
            }
        });
    });
</script>

<div class="ui-widget">
    <label for="tags">Tags: </label>
    <input id="tags">
</div>

This works nicely. But I need this method in a multiple of instances of the autocomplete widget, so I prefer extending the autocomplete widget using the widget factory.

This works nicely whenever I want to override methods of the autocomplete plugin:

$.widget("ui.myAutocomplete", $.extend({}, $.ui.autocomplete.prototype, {
    search: function( value, event ) {
        // this WORKS!
        console.log('overriding autocomplete.search')

        return $.ui.autocomplete.prototype.search.apply(this, arguments);
    }
}));

However, I have no clue how to do that for the underlying menu widget.

I tried to override the _init method and binding a function to the select event. However this does not work as I don’t know how to access the bind method of the menu-widget (or this menu widget is not yet there at this point during runtime)

$.widget("ui.myAutocomplete", $.extend({}, $.ui.autocomplete.prototype, {
    _init: function() {
        // this does NOT work. 
        this.bind('select', function() { console.log('item has been selected') })

        return $.ui.autocomplete.prototype._init.apply(this, arguments);
    }
}));

Answer 1

I think you’re close; you should be overriding _create instead of _init:

$.widget("ui.myAutocomplete", $.extend({}, $.ui.autocomplete.prototype, {
    _create: function() {
        // call autocomplete's default create method:
        $.ui.autocomplete.prototype._create.apply(this, arguments);

        // this.element is the element the widget was invoked with
        this.element.bind("autocompleteselect", this._select);
    },
    _select: function(event, ui) {
        // Code to be executed upon every select.
    }
}));

Usage:

$("input").myAutocomplete({
    /* snip */
});

Here’s a working example: http://jsfiddle.net/EWsS4/