Question

I’m using asp.NET MVC, and am looking at the JQuery autocomplete plugin for what I want to do. I need some extra functionality that I don’t think it provides.

I have a page with two text fields, First and Last name. Ideally, when someone begins typing into either, I would like autocomplete to display both the first and last name of all matches. If one of these matches were selected, I would like only the appropriate (first/last) name to go into the current field, while the other field is also filled in with the appropriate name.

So the problems here are that A) I would like the suggestion text to be different from the value that would be filled into the current field, and B) I would like to update multiple fields from a single autocomplete. Does this make sense? It seems to be difficult to find information on this situation on the net. Thanks in advance for your time.

Answer 1

If you decide you really want to do this, this example will do what you want. You can use the result() method to add in the functionality you need.

$(document).ready(function(){

    var data = [ "John Doe","Jane Doe","Mike Smith" ];


    $("#firstname").autocomplete(data).result(function(event, item) {
            var rdata = item[0].split(" ");
            $("#firstname").val(rdata[0]);
            $("#lastname").val(rdata[1]);
    });

    $("#lastname").autocomplete(data).result(function(event, item) {
            var rdata = item[0].split(" ");
            $("#firstname").val(rdata[0]);
            $("#lastname").val(rdata[1]);
    });

});