I'm making a registration form for my users and I'd like them to write in their city.
So as they type in a city name, the auto-complete options of the jQuery UI component would load asynchronously.
The example on the page shows how to use a .php file, but how does this fit into a pure HTTP solution?
How do I fetch these options?
I have a simple table accessed using Entity Framework and the repository pattern:
table City
------------------
CityId int primary key,
Name nvarchar(256)
The autocomplete plugin will send a GET request to the path you specify with a ?term=blah querystring parameter.
You need to add an Action to your controller to handle this request, and return an array of matching values as json.
public ActionResult AutoCompleteCity(string term) {
var db = new myEFDataContext();
return Json(db.Cities.Where(city => city.Name.StartsWith(term)).Select(city => city.Name), JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet);
}
Then in your javascript you hook up the autcomplete function like so.
$('#cityTextBoxId').autocomplete({ source: '/Controller/AutoCompleteCity' });
