WPF Combobox with auto-complete/auto-filter?

Question

I am eager to find some solid (free, Open Source, or tutorial/example) code to make a WPF Combobox do autocomlete/autofilter as the user types. But everything I've tried so far has had some sort of problem...

• A Reusable WPF Autocomplete TextBox came close, but I can't get it to work with more than one filter (more info here).

• WPF autocomplete textbox/combobox doesn't work for me because it inherits from UserControl, and thus doesn't support the DataTemplates I need (for showing/selecting the value of one property for an object with multiple properties).

• Automatically Filtering a ComboBox in WPF didn't work because it doesn't seem to ever find the EditableTextBox portion of the inherited ComboBox code (via (TextBox)base.GetTemplateChild("PART_EditableTextBox") which seems to always returns null).

• Building a Filtered ComboBox for WPF just gets stuck in a refresh loop then overflows the stack after I type just a few letters.

Other things I've considered:

• I know that Windows Forms' Combobox control has AutoCompleteMode and I could embed it in WPF, but I can't imagine it would play very well with my WPF data bindings.

• Perhaps it is too complex and I need to simplify, maybe by building one-dimensional (single-property) ObservableCollections for the ComboBoxen... However, the challenge of applying multiple filters (one set by another control's value, and one from what the user is typing) to multiple controls using different views of the same DataSet would require a ridiculous amount of processing power to destroy and rebuild the list every time the user types a character!

So... I'm at wit's end. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

If your Combobox has some data source attached to it , just make

1-IsTextSearchEnabled = true. 2-IsEditable = true. 

you are good to go

Answer 2

Try this one: http://blogs.windowsclient.net/dragonz/archive/2010/02/23/autocomplete-textbox-control-for-wpf.aspx