Autocomplete/Typeahead example?!?

Question

I've got a working version of Autocomplete using the Ajaxcontroltoolkit. However, the service method signature is required to return a String[] to render the autocomplete suggestions in markup.

My service actually returns an object Foo that is made up of a string Image URL and a string Title (in JSON or XML).. anyone know of a way to have an Autocomplete accept an object instead of a string so that I can display the Image next to the title in the suggestion list?

Answer 1

You cannot do this natively with the control. The closest you could get is taking your Foo object and serializing that into something like http://myserver.com/images/myImage.jpg|myTitle. Then on the client side, you could utilize the OnClientPopulated and OnClientItemSelected properties to parse the image and title and do a custom display.

You have the jQuery tag there, so are you also considering the use of jQuery UI's autocomplete? It is definitely capable of what you're wanting to do.