Question

I was wondering how I would be able to get this working? I’ve read the demo files, but I’m curious if there is a way to make it work like this. I’ve got one php file that is something like this

$query = "SELECT DISTINCT City FROM Locations ORDER BY City";
foreach($DBH->query($query) as $row)
{
    $array[] = $row['City'];
}
echo json_encode($array);

and some js

$('.searchbox').autocomplete('test.php', {minChars: 3,});

When I test it, I type in three letters, and instead of suggestions, I get the whole json array. I know that it’s possible for this jquery-autocomplete to work with local data, but I just don’t know how. https://github.com/dyve/jquery-autocomplete/ is the source, by the way.

Answer 1

The docs say you should set a remoteDataType option whose value is json if your backend is returning a JSON Array:

remoteDataType (default value: false)

If this is set to ‘json’, the autocompleter expects a JSON array from the server. Any other
settings, it defaults to the native text format using lineSeparator and Cellseparator (see below).

E.g.

$('.searchbox').autocomplete('test.php', {
  minChars: 3,
  remoteDataType: 'json'
});

Also, your server-side query should make use of the q parameter that the autocompleter sends in the GET to only return the results that match what has been typed in.