http://www.charles-reace.com/blog/2009/09/22/book-list-app-using-auto-suggest-with-codeigniter/ Charles Reace's blog about PHP, MySQL, and life in general Mon, 22 Aug 2011 17:18:05 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 http://www.charles-reace.com/blog/2009/09/22/book-list-app-using-auto-suggest-with-codeigniter/comment-page-1/#comment-1750 Felix Tue, 22 Sep 2009 22:37:35 +0000 http://www.charles-reace.com/blog/?p=217#comment-1750 Indeed, AutoSuggest scripts can be hard to "import" and adapt to your own project, mainly because each project is unique. I wrote an AutoSuggest script from the ground up (well, using MooTools) for tastekid.com. Challenges included (well, besides the usual browser inconsistencies and cross-platformness) getting a non-standard response (well, it's JSON, but formatted more weirdly), a more complex way of filtering results (e.g. if you type "Ra" it will also suggest "*The* Ramones") and finding the right balance between javascript filtering of results and PHP filtering. Normally, PHP would return 20-some results, but javascript would display only 5 of them and keep filtering them as the user types. When it has less than two suggestions, it will make another request. It was a two-day job, but it was fun :) You can view the script (if you care) <a href="http://www.tastekid.com/javascript/ac.js" rel="nofollow">here</a> (the site doesn't include it, it uses a single cached and minified js file that contains everything). Indeed, AutoSuggest scripts can be hard to “import” and adapt to your own project, mainly because each project is unique. I wrote an AutoSuggest script from the ground up (well, using MooTools) for tastekid.com. Challenges included (well, besides the usual browser inconsistencies and cross-platformness) getting a non-standard response (well, it’s JSON, but formatted more weirdly), a more complex way of filtering results (e.g. if you type “Ra” it will also suggest “*The* Ramones”) and finding the right balance between javascript filtering of results and PHP filtering. Normally, PHP would return 20-some results, but javascript would display only 5 of them and keep filtering them as the user types. When it has less than two suggestions, it will make another request. It was a two-day job, but it was fun :)
You can view the script (if you care) here (the site doesn’t include it, it uses a single cached and minified js file that contains everything).

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