To provide some context, I have a combobox that the user interacts with to select an insurance company. Unfortunately they don’t require just the name; sometimes insurance companies have the same name, and the only way to distinguish between them is to use their address (eg a Medicare office in North Carolina vs. a Medicare office in South Carolina). What I’ve currently done is use the combobox’s DrawItem event to draw a tooltip next to the ComboBox when the dropdown list is displayed. The list itself displays the insurance company names, but the tooltip will display the address of the currently selected company. The combobox is set to DropDownList, so it’s impossible for them to pick anything but what’s in the list.
Well, now I’m being told to change this. The users are no longer content to have to click the combobox or hit the arrow keys. They want comboboxes that they can type in and have an autosuggest list appear as they type. That’s all well and good but this is where I’m running into a wall. My cute little scheme of using a tooltip can’t work in that situation because the autosuggest list is a completely separate control. DrawItem doesn’t touch it, and I can’t find a way to custom draw the autosuggest list. The other problem is that autosuggest doesn’t do duplicate entries, so even though I have two different insurance companies only one will appear in the list simply because they share the same name.
The only other idea I’ve had so far is to somehow scroll the dropdown list to the appropriate item upon the user pressing a key. But I can’t figure out how to set the highlighted item in the dropdown list without setting selectedindex. If I use selectedindex, it goes ahead and replaces the text.
Does anyone have any suggestions for how to proceed? Am I on the right track, or do am I trying too hard and need to do something else entirely?
You could use a text field where the user types in their text, and narrow the selection in the dropbox down based on that. To get around the same-name-but-different-company problem, you could list the address of the company after the name in a parenthesis. If the user types in a name that is invalid, put up an error/warning icon next to the text field.
To update the selection at runtime, you can add an event listener to the text field and query the current text to decide whether it is a valid prefix, or not.