• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5

Auto-Complete

A nice feature that I first noticed as being received positively by the Internet community is the auto-complete feature in Gmail. Basically, when you're entering the e-mail address of the person you're sending a message to, Gmail searches your list of contacts (using Ajax) and automatically drops down a listing of all matches. You are then free to click one of the dropped-down objects to fill it into the requested field. The whole code integration is seamless and makes for a handy feature.

The next example will show you how to do the same thing although it's not quite as in-depth as the Gmail solution. Basically, I have built a way to feed a list of objects through an array (a database solution would be more effective, but that is outside of the scope of this example and will be shown later in the book), and then display them based on what the user has entered. The user can then click the name to fill out the field (hence the auto-completion).