jQuery UI: Autocomplete With Select Elements

The jQuery UI autocomplete widget expects an input as it's target element. It also expects a data source — the fundamental job of the autocomplete widget is tying these two things together. When the user starts typing, the autocomplete filters the data source, and offers the user a selection of possible input text values. When you think about it, the select element is similar to the autocomplete.

jQuery UI: Highlight Selected Menu Item

The jQuery UI menu widget doesn't actually show the user which item they've clicked. It's helpful, however, if the user knows what they're looking at. Selecting a menu item will probably change the content elsewhere on the page, and the last thing clicked should give an indication of what we're looking at. With the select event, we can change the display state of the selected menu item.

jQuery UI Select Menu

jQuery UI 1.8 is now at release candidate 3 and is looking like a 1.8 final release will be available any time now. After looking at the button demos, I haven't yet decided if I'm going to replace my existing custom buttons with these new widgets.

The auto-complete widget does look very promising, especially for large data sets. However, I have several instances where I have only a small data set and using an auto-complete widget would be overkill.

The select-menu widget looks perfect and I'm looking forward to a stable version in jQuery UI. It will be nice to replace the standard select elements, which look really out of place in a jQuery UI theme.