This project is an addition to the excellent Chosen jQuery plugin that makes HTML input forms more friendly. Chosen adds search boxes to select
HTML elements, so I felt it could use the addition of ajax autocomplete for awesomely dynamic forms.
This script bootstraps the existing Chosen plugin without making any modifications to the original code. Eventually I would love to see this functionality built-in to the library, but until then, this seems to work pretty well.
This plugin exposes a new jQuery function named ajaxChosen
that we call on a select
element. The first argument are the options passed to the jQuery $.ajax function. The data
parameter is optional, and the success
callback is also optional.
The second argument is a callback that tells the plugin what HTML option
elements to make. It is passed the data returned from the ajax call, and you have to return an object where the key is the HTML option
value attribute and the value is the text to display. In other words:
terms[3] = "Ohio";
becomes:
<option value="3">Ohio</option>
There are some additional ajax-chosen specific options you can pass into the first argument to control it's behavior.
- minTermLength: minimum number of characters that must be typed before an ajax call is fired
- afterTypeDelay: how many milliseconds to wait after typing stops to fire the ajax call
- jsonTermKey: the ajax request key to use for the search query (defaults to
term
)
$("#example-input").ajaxChosen({
method: 'GET',
url: '/ajax-chosen/data.php',
dataType: 'json'
}, function (data) {
var terms = {};
$.each(data, function (i, val) {
terms[i] = val;
});
return terms;
});
ajax-chosen is written in Coffeescript, so there is a Cakefile provided that will perform all necessary tasks for you. Simply run cake
to see all available commands.