Before we continue: It can't be a predefined list.
I need it sort of like this: http://loopj.com/tokeninput/demo.html ... A jQuery plugin that allows the user to type a string of words, press enter, and it makes it a block of text, from there they can press the X to get rid of it, or type more key words into the input area. I've found many things that do this, but all are pulling information from a predefined list of choices.
The site that you linked to, that's sending a request off to a PHP page that returns the results for the query. What's stopping you from doing the same thing? The PHP/ASP/Whatever page that you send the request to can then do whatever you need to do to get the list (from a DB, from an external site - cached - or whatever) and then return the results.
Okay from what I understand you have the code to do this however you don't want a predefined list.
The simplest way is to render the list as part of the server response. This way, your client code can reference this list rendered from the server. The disadvantage to this is that it is static and not very flexible. However, this is easiest as the list can be rendered every time the page is reloaded.
Perhaps a better way is to make a webservice request for this list, and define it on the client. This way you can pull in multiple types of content dynamically without reloading the page. You would make an Ajax request for the items and then load your list based on the Ajax response.
Well my solution was to use LoopJ's Token Input plugin and modify the code a bit so that it's returning what is being typed out. I'd be interested to see if anyone else has a plug in that will natively support it though.
Here you go: http://www.spookandpuff.com/examples/tagEntry.html
The general gist is...
Here's the code:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/>
<title>Free Tag Entry</title>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
$(function() {
//The event handler for the input:
$('#tagEntry').keypress(function(event){
if (event.keyCode == '13') { //If Enter is pressed
var newTagName = $(this).attr('value');
//Clear the helper message:
$('#tagEntryHelper').text('');
//Check if the tag exists already:
if (
!$('#addedTags > li > .tagName').filter(function(){
return $(this).text() == newTagName;
}).length
) {
//If not, add the value to the list of tags:
$('#addedTags').prepend('<li><input type="checkbox" name="tagName" value="' + newTagName + '" checked="checked"/><span class="tagName">' + newTagName + '</span> <a href="#" class="remove">Remove</a></li>');
} else {
//Tell the user they messed up:
$('#tagEntryHelper').text('You already added that tag.');
};
//Clear the input ready for the next tag
$(this).attr('value', '');
}
});
//The event handler for removing tags via a 'remove' link/icon (live is used so it works on newly added tags):
$('#addedTags .remove').live('click', function(){
$(this).closest('li').remove();
return false;
});
//An event handler for removing tags via unchecking a box
$('#addedTags :checkbox').live('change', function(){
if ($(this).not(':checked')) {
$(this).closest('li').remove();
return false;
}
})
});
</script>
</head>
<body>
<input id="tagEntry" type="text"/> <span id="tagEntryHelper"></span>
<ul id="addedTags">
</ul>
</body>
</html>
This works, though I have used some jQuery conventions which make the code easier to read, but are probably not the best in terms of performance. Unless you're expecting users to be working with thousands of tags, I wouldn't worry though - it should be fine.
I have included a checkbox in the tag list - assuming that eventually, you're going to want to post the contents of the list back to the server (probably as part of a form). You can hide these checkboxes with CSS if you don't want them visible, or, you can use them as the delete mechanism if you like. Either way, because all the checkboxes are named the same, your form will post back a comma separated list of tags (which should be easy to deal with at the server side).
Have a look at the demo - is that what you want?