I have a form field where the user needs to choose from a few names \ but there are way too many items to use a drop down menu. I want to use an <input type="text"> but want to help the user with auto complete. the problem with autocomplete is that once the user enters a wrong letter combination he gets no options like in Sacramento, lets say the user quickly enters "sacre" then he gets no choices. is there any work around for this? or other ways to implement this feature another idea i had was to open a popup and display a list of all possible choices with a filter-as-you-type search box above it and once the user ends up with just his choice, transfer that value to the form page. the problem with this is it might take a long time to load all the possible values and also i have no idea how to transfer the user's choice from the popup to the form input
There are ways to do it, depending on just how many options there are will dictate the correct option to take, if it really is a large number then ajax and a small webservice is the way to go.... and example of this type of thing can be seen http://asp.net/AJAX/AjaxControlToolkit/Samples/AutoComplete/AutoComplete.aspx
wht im building is a database backed web application so something of the kind you suggested is possible but it leads to too many DB queries, i know there is a workaround for this (by setting a min number of chars before a DB lookup) but still the fact that it leads to unnecessary queries is what worries me because im on a shared host can someone give me a few hints on how i should implement the other idea - show a popup with all possible values and pass the selected value back to the form