Question

New to ASP.NET MVC and programming, and I have searched high and low for materials on this subject but haven’t found a concrete answer for my particular problem.

The project I am working on requires the use of WCF services. Initially I started with a jQuery autocomplete function that worked, however moving the code to a WCF service has broken some communication. The autocomplete functionality no longer works

WCF Service

public IList<Location> QuickSearchLocation(string term)
    {
        using (var db = new InspectionEntities())
        {
            //return all locations except the reserved "Other"
            return db.Locations
                .Where(r => r.LocationName.Contains(term) && r.LocationId !=    Constants.OtherId)
                .ToList();
        }
    } 

The above code is meant to takes user input based on relation to child table. If user input does not match data in child table, the users entry is saved to an “other” column in the main db.

Controller

public ActionResult QuickSearchLocation(string term)
    {
        return Json(_service.QuickSearchLocation(term), JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet);
    }

View

div class="editor-field">
        @Html.TextBoxFor(m=>m.LocationId,new {data_autocomplete =     Url.Action("QuickSearchLocation", "Inspection")})

script

$(document).ready(function () {

$(":input[data-autocomplete]").each(function () {

    $(this).autocomplete({ source: $(this).attr("data-autocomplete")});
});

Any insight on my problem would be helpful.

Answer 1

Autocomplete expects either only labels or labels with values. On the other hand, you’re serving it the whole Location object.

You should therefore, create a helper class:

public class AutocompleteLocation{
    public AutocompleteLocation(Location location){
        label = location.LocationName;
        value = location.LocationId;
    }
    public string label {get;set;}
    public string value {get;set;}
}

After this, you should change your QuickSearchLocation controller method like this:

public ActionResult QuickSearchLocation(string term)
{
    return Json(_service.QuickSearchLocation(term).Select(l => new AutocompleteLocation(l)).ToList(), JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet);
}

You should also consider not returning all the results but, rather, only first few (10 for example).