Trigger jQuery Autocomplete manually

Question

I'm using jQuery UI Autocomplete with some AJAX (the data isn't pulled until after they stop typing). I would like to make it so once the data is found, Autocomplete will then pop-up as a search result. This works, however only when I start typing again (the dropdown doesn't trigger until I type because it's not initialized until after I stop typing).

My code:

var availableTags = [
    "Perl",
    "PHP",
    "Python",
    "Ruby"
];
$('input#mainSearchBox').autocomplete({
    source: availableTags,
        minLength: 0
});
    $('input#mainSearchBox').data('autocomplete').menu.active;

The last part was an attempt to activate autocomplete, but it fails.

Answer 1

The search method should do the trick:

$('input#mainSearchBox').autocomplete("search");

Fiddle