jQuery UI has an AutoComplete widget. The AutoComplete widget is quite nice and straight forward to use. In this post, I will show you how to use jQuery AutoComplete widget to consolidate AutoComplete function in ASP.NET MVC application.

Step 1

The first step is to add the jQuery scripts and styles. With ASP.NET MVC, the following code does the work:

@Styles.Render("~/Content/themes/base/css")
@Scripts.Render("~/bundles/jquery")   
@Scripts.Render("~/bundles/jqueryui")

Step 2

Using the AutoComplete widget is also simple. You will have to add a textbox and attach the AutoComplete widget to the textbox. The only parameter that is required for the widget to function is source. For this example, we will get the data for the AutoComplete functionality from a MVC action method.

$(document).ready(function () {
    $('#tags').autocomplete(
        {
            source: '@Url.Action("TagSearch", "Home")'
    });
})

In the above code, the textbox with id=tags is attached with the AutoComplete widget. The source points to the URL of TagSearch action in the HomeController: /Home/TagSearch. The HTML of the textbox is below:

<input type="text" id="tags" />

Step 3

When the user types some text in the textbox, the action method (TagSearch) is called with a parameter in the request body. The parameter name is term. So, your action method should have the following signature:

public ActionResult TagSearch(string term)
{
    // Get Tags from database
    string[] tags = { "ASP.NET", "WebForms",
                    "MVC", "jQuery", "ActionResult",
                    "MangoDB", "Java", "Windows" };
    return this.Json(tags.Where(t => t.StartsWith(term)),
                    JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet);
}

Now, the AutoComplete functionality is complete!

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