Text box with drop down suggestions

Question

I currently have a databound dropdown list on my ASP.Net C# 2.0 website that has around 400 items in it. I want to replace it with something similar like the textbox in google search where you enter letter and only the entries starting with those letters pop up

what is a good way of implementing it? Are there controls that already exists that anybody can suggest?

Answer 1

One way to do this using HTML5 (for small datasets of course) is datalist:

<input list="users" name="users">
  <datalist id="users">
    <option value="Alice">
    <option value="Bob">
    <option value="Chuck">
    <option value="Chris">
    <option value="Duke">
    <option value="Emily">
  </datalist>

For larger datasets AJAX is a better way to go.

Answer 2

Take a look at http://docs.jquery.com/Plugins/Autocomplete

Also here is a tutorial for use with ASP.Net

Answer 3

check complete.ly too

http://complete-ly.appspot.com/

it has no dependencies and weights very little.

Answer 4

If these are known enrties, you can use JQuery, and on the OnUpdate event:

1. if it's a long list, make Ajax Request to your webserver, retrieve the best option
2. if it's a short list, you can load all the options to the page, and offer the optional texts without making a server request.

Checkout the JQuery library for implementations on how to display the suggestion.