Selecting more than one element from autocomplete list?

[noble-surfer]

I have recently started working on an AngularJS application developed by my company (the application had already been developed before I joined), and have been asked to look at implementing a feature where the user could add multiple buttons to a single table cell.

The table is modified using a dialog, and I noticed when I started working on this, that the text field used on the dialog to add column/ row data to the table uses the ngTagsInput library. This autocomplete feature works as expected- when you start typing into the field, a drop down list is displayed showing all of the tags that match what has been typed so far- and the results are filtered further as you continue to type.

I added the functionality to our code, so that when the first character typed into the text field is a ':', then the autocomplete function would show a list of the pages available in the application, and when the user selects one of these pages from the list, that page's title is displayed on a button in the table, which when clicked, redirects the user to that page.

However, one apparent limitation of what I've done here, is that the address that the user types into the field is only displayed as a button when they select the page element from the autocomplete list.

I now want to allow the user to add multiple buttons to a single table cell, and have written the code to do this- the browser console indicates that when the user types the two addresses (separated by a ';' character) they are added correctly, however, they are not currently displayed as buttons, because they have not been selected from the auto-complete's drop down list.

What I would like to be able to do, is to select multiple items from the auto-complete's drop down, and have them all displayed as buttons within the same table cell. Is there a way of doing this?

[dfiori]

+1
this will be very usefull. It's quite a pain if you have to select multiple similar items. Every time you need to write again the name.
Please add a parameter to leave autocomplete opened after selection.