History / Auto complete Combo Box?

[Anon]

I'm developing a front end for a database. I have used Access before but I want to avoid going back to that mess at all costs. But the problem with a web based frontend is there is no combo box. You know like the one you type the url into on most browser. I want a box that will be able to auto complete what the user has typed in, and be able to list what the user typed in before. I know that new browsers will do this but that's no good if the user goes to a different workstation. Is there any way to get this to work with php? i'm thinking maybe a text box over top of a list box somehow. But before I reinvent the wheel, has anyone done this before?

[zalath]

Nearly impossible. The sheer amount of text you'd have to store would be enormous. It's not possible to combine the two inputs, but you could watch for the keypress event in the normal text field and then, say, on the onBlur event you could store the typed value somewhere etc. I suggest you forget about it though. It would be extremely clumsy and heavy - the browsers aren't meant for this.

-L-

[bdbush]

I would suggest you rethink the GUI.
There is no combo list box for browsers, but there should be.

What you could do, to help your users and save yourself a lot of dev time is use a cookie.

Set a cookie with the last few values that a user types into a text box and display them in a "separate" drop down box called "History", for instance.

The nice thing about php and cookies is that you can call them just like variables during the page load.

As far as autocomplete goes, you are looking at a pretty hefty algorithm. Basically you would have a database that contains all of the possible words that could be typed. After the user types the first letter, you would capture it and query for all of the words that start with that letter. Then you capture the second and query for words that begin with those two letters and so on... It is a drill-down tree model.

Once you have a sufficient number of letters typed, you can begin filling in the textbox.

Agreed, this is not something that is best attempted on a scripting level, but is better when compiled into more efficient code.

--brian