Question

I’ve developed a rails website in which I’ve got a text box with autocompletion facilities (When the user starts typing, a list of valid values “drops down” under it). For this, I used Rail’s autocomplete.

Now I’m developing a mobile version of this site. Since the target browsing phone will be the iphone, I’m using jqtouch.

Hence my question is: What is the best way to do an “autocompletable ajax text box” on an iphone web app?

I suspect there should be an easy way of doing this since jqtouch uses jquery, and there’re several autocomplete plugins for it (by the way, no idea which one is best suited for this task). However, if anyone thinks there’s a better way to do this than with jqtouch, I’m open to suggestions.

Answer 1

Ok, after nearly a week employed on this, I have to respond to myself:

As of today (Feb 2010) I could not find any “good” or at least “standarized” way of doing ajax autocompletes for the iphone. I don’t think there are.

The only options you have right now are:

• Cook yourself a custom autocomplete (probably using one of the jquery plugins). The result might not look very good on an iphone, unless, as Jon says, you limit it to 3 results.
• Go for something completely different. In my case, I’ve decided to have two fields instead of one: a text box that the user can “use as a filter” and a “dynamic select” in which the user chooses the right answer.

I’ll be glad to accept any alternatives if they appear, in the future. For now I consider this closed (with no valid response).