Why did jquery ui autocomplete drop support for these feautures?

Question

the jquery UI team has a blog on how to replace the legacy autocomplete and justifies that it can replicate all of the old features and options. Based on my testing, i dont think they can replicate:

1. selectFirst if you have a remote data source
2. selectFirst or mustMatch if you are using multiple: true

i see this questions on how to replicate some of the legacy autocomplete options from this plugin, and there is a selected answer but it doesn't address these situations.

The jquery ui folks have an example of replicating selectFirst in the new autocomplete, but unless i am mistaken, it only works with local data source (not remote data source as the menu is usally not filled out before the event get called).

am i missing something or are these scenarios simply not supported in jquery ui autocomplete ??

Answer 1

These scenarios are supported actually, but you have to extend ui.autocomplete widget to achieve desired behavior. Quick example to implement selectFirst feature:

$.widget( "ui.autocomplete2", $.ui.autocomplete, {
    _renderMenu: function( ul, items ) {
        var self = this;
        $.each( items, function( index, item ) {
            self._renderItem( ul, item );
        });
        // setTimeout is needed because jQueryUI automaticaly removes
        // active item just after menu rendering
        setTimeout( function(){
            self.menu.activate(
                // fake event object. Needed to avoid jQueryUI error 
                // (unsafe property access)
                {'type':'fake'}, 
                ul.find(':first') );
        }, 1);
    }
});

Attention: Always check if new widget is still compatible with new version jQuery UI!

Update: sample mustMatch implementation han be found here: http://jqueryui.com/demos/autocomplete/combobox.html