Question

I’m creating a web application for work where the user has to enter the name of the person that requested the job. I’d like to create a simple AJAX auto-suggest dropdown so they don’t need to type the entire name. On the backend, the database will provide suggestions based on previous entries. The website is built using CakePHP 1.1.

I know there are a lot of libraries out there, some better than others. Which do you think is the fastest and easiest to implement?

Answer 1

Since you are using CakePHP 1.1 I suggest you check out the Manual portion that deals with Helpers

If you go down to ‘AJAX’, you can see you can do something like this in your controller:

function autocomplete () {     $this->set('people',     $this->Person->findAll('name LIKE '%{$this->data['Person']['name']}%'')     );     $this->layout = 'ajax'; } 

And in your autocomplete.thtml view, you would have:

<ul> <?php foreach($people as $person): ?> <li><?php echo $person['Person']['name']; ?></li> <?php endforeach; ?> </ul> 

And to create the autocomplete field in another view, you would do:

<form action='/people/index' method='POST'> <?php echo $ajax->autoComplete('Person/name', '/people/autocomplete/')?> <?php echo $html->submit('View Person')?> </form> 

In order for this to work you need to have ‘Ajax’ in your helpers array, and have the Prototype/script.aculo.us libraries included.

Good luck.