Activate jQuery autocomplete on focus

Theia installation has been updated - September 10, 2011

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Activate jQuery autocomplete on focus « home

posted by: Lev

view all "home" items by Lev

posted on 20:29 - 13 January 2011 | posted by Lev

last modified on 20:31 - 13 January 2011 | last modified by Lev

I'm kind of surprised it took a little researching to get something this simple working as expected, but it seems as though jQuery's autocomplete UI feature won't automatically show you the default options (even if minLength is set to 0) unless the user hits some key in the field (even if focused).

I did some research and at first this was the best I found:

http://forum.jquery.com/topic/autocomplete-on-focus-show-default-drop-down

Unfortunately, this approach seems to have a caveat (at least for me on jQuery UI 1.8.7) - it only works the first time you place focus on the field. Oddly enough, the trigger is actually happening each subsequent time the field is focused, the auto-complete tool only pops up the first time.

Without rambling on too much, I'll show you what I came up with which works flawlessly each and every time the field is focused:

JAVASCRIPT CODE

    $('selector').autocomplete
        ({
        minLength: 0,
        source: function (t, r)
            {
            // get list here
            }
        })
   .focus
        (
        function()
            {
            if (this.value == "")
                {
                $(this).autocomplete('search', '');
                }
            }
        );

I hope this helps someone! :)

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