Difference between MultiAutoCompleteTextView and AutoCompleteTextView

Question

Can someone explain the difference between MultiAutoCompleteTextView and AutoCompleteTextView?

Answer 1

AutocompleteTextView only offers suggestions about the whole sentence and MultiAutoCompleteTextView offers suggestions for every token in the sentence. You can specify what is the delimiter between tokens.

String[] words=new String[] {      "word1", "word2", "word3", "word4", "word5"  };  MultiAutoCompleteTextView macTv = (MultiAutoCompleteTextView) this.findViewById(R.id.mac_tv); ArrayAdapter<String> aaStr = new ArrayAdapter<String>(this,android.R.layout.dropdown_item,words); macTv.setAdapter(aaStr); macTv.setTokenizer(new MultiAutoCompleteTextView.CommaTokenizer() ); 

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and:

<MultiAutoCompleteTextView  android:id="@+id/mac_tv" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:completionThreshold="1" /> 

with this example the suggestion comes after every comma.

Answer 2

The choice between using the AutoCompleteTextView or the MultiAutoCompleteTextView comes down to whether or not the user should be allowed to input only "one item" as provided by the adapter, or "multiple items."

So for example, if you were writing an email app, and you wanted the "To:" field to be an autocomplete field, pulling matches from an address book, chances are you want to allow the user to pick multiple recipients for a message, and would make this field a MultiAutoCompleteTextView.

On the other hand, the "From:" field in the same example email app, you would need to enforce only a single selection by the user from their configured email accounts. And so an AutoCompleteTextView would be appropriate here.