[Nitro] ajax autocomplete example

[Kashia Buch]

Hi

I played around with the ajax example a bit and stumbled over the  
auto_complete function, which is not yet fully useful like this (imho). I  
thought, wouldn't it be better, if there was some kind of "search"  
mechanism built in, so you can type a few chars into the box, and then  
just get the corresponding items from the list.
Well, I came to a solution, which is pretty much simple, but it's also  
crap. I wonder if there is a better way to do this.

--- public/js/controls.js
this.options.method        = 'get'; (instead of post)

--- src/controller.rb
def country_auto_complete
   searchstring = get_ajax_value

   countries = %w{Greece England USA Germany Italy France Netherlands}
   countries.delete_if {|x| x !~ /#{searchstring}/i }

   build do
     ul {
       countries.each { |country| li country }
     }
   end
end
	
def get_ajax_value
   request = response.headers["REQUEST_URI"]
   /(.*)_auto_complete[^\?]*\?\1=([^&]*)/.match(request)[2]
end

--- public/index.xhtml
<p>
       Auto complete example:<br />
       <label>Enter a country:</label>
       <input autocomplete="off" type="text" id="country" name="country" />
       <div id="country_auto_complete" class="auto_complete"> </div>
</p>

autocomplete="off", since Opera (8.02) doesn't seem to respect the  
el.autocomplete = "off" from javascript, and the additional name="country"  
to distinguish the GET value from other values and get it by that Regex.


Well, while this approach certainly works quite well, as you can see,  
parsing the REQUEST_URI is pretty much ewwww. (I wouldn't even know how to  
do that stuff with POST...)
What I would like to know, is there a more standard way to do this?

If there isn't, here would be my idea for an api:

def country_auto_complete(ajax_return_values)
   ...
end

Sadly I'm not good enough to code that myself, would love to hear your  
ideas.

Kash
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