Trigger select tag to show options

Question

Im doing my own ajax thing with dropdowns. Ive positioned an imput over a select tag. When stuff is typed into input it collects from db and populates the select menu. Problem is its not noticeable. Is there a way to make the select menu open as if a user has clicked on it?

Answer 1

Nope, you're going to have to use something like a DIV with overflow: auto to emulate the behavior of an opened select.

Answer 2

The HTML5 <datalist> element would help out here, but since there are only a few browsers that support it at the moment, you will have to rely on a JS implementation.

The following was the least buggy implementation I could find from a simple Google search
http://dhtmlx.com/docs/products/dhtmlxCombo/index.shtml. It supports Ajax as well as up/down arrow keys.

StackOverflow also uses it's own implementation of auto-complete when you start typing tags, maybe you can get some ideas from looking at the source code?