Question

I’m looking for a library for Autocomplete support in text controls which remembers all previous entries of the user and provide auto-complete support for it.

For example for ‘recent files’ I use http://www.genghisgroup.com/ and it works great. Do you know something like that for this purpose?

UPDATE : This is a .NET Winforms application and I’m using normal Text Control.

Answer 1

Built into a .NET TextBox is AutoComplete functionality. First you set the AutoCompleteMode property (Suggest, Append, etc.), and then you choose the AutoCompleteSource. Your choices for that are:

FileSystem HistoryList RecentlyUsedList AllUrl AllSystemSources FileSystemDirectories CustomSource None ListItems

In your case, you’d use CustomSource, and then populate the AutoCompleteCustomSource Collection that’s a property on the TextBox. I would suggest to have a simple SqlCe database, to where you can store the values the user has entered in the past, and then when the app loads, retrieve those values, and populate the AutoCompleteCustomSource.

A quick code sample:

private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) {     this.textBox1.AutoCompleteMode = AutoCompleteMode.Suggest;     this.textBox1.AutoCompleteSource = AutoCompleteSource.CustomSource;      string[] items = GetListForCustomSource();     this.textBox1.AutoCompleteCustomSource.AddRange(items);  }  private string[] GetListForCustomSource() {     var result = new List<string>();      foreach(var value in Enum.GetNames(typeof(DayOfWeek)))     {         result.Add(value);     }      return result.ToArray(); } 

I jsut used DayOfWeek as an example, but you can query a database in that method, and return the results.