Question

I’m using the rails3-jquery-autocomplete gem on a field with non-unique values, but I want the results it retrieves to be duplicate-free. Any ideas on how to accomplish this?

Answer 1

I had the same problem in my project https://github.com/marciomr/Terra-Livre and I solved it doing the following:

1. I installed rails3-jquery-autocomplete as a plugin in vendor/plugin directory
2. I changed the file helpers.rb like this:

def json_for_autocomplete(items, method, extra_data)
  json = items.collect do |item| # here I put the result in a variable
    hash = {"label" => item.send(method), "value" => item.send(method)} #here I removed the id
    extra_data.each do |datum|
      hash[datum] = item.send(datum)
    end if extra_data
    hash
  end
  json.uniq # this line is new
end

I removed the id from the json file and then retrieved uniq values.
Since I didn’t need the id it worked fine for me. I think if I need the id I can put it in extra_data, but I am not sure.

I have just forked the project with this alteration: git://github.com/marciomr/rails3-jquery-autocomplete.git