Auto Complete Design Pattern

February 13, 2006 at 5:00 am by Bill Scott | In Design | 17 Comments

Problem Summary

The user needs to enter an item into a text box which could ambiguous or hard to remember and therefore has the potential to be mis-typed.

Auto completion of contacts on Yahoo! Mail Beta

Auto Complete is under-utilized in most web sites and web applications. Most text fields could benefit from the addition of this feature. When done correctly, it lightens the load of the user both mentally and physically.

We are currently planning to provide this behavior in an upcoming release of the Yahoo! User Interface Library.

The pattern can be found at: Auto Complete.

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17 Comments »

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This sounds really cool. Could you be more specific on “when” you plan to release this behaviour?

Comment by Ola — February 14, 2006 #
Ok soooo…. where is the library?

Comment by Alex Kane — February 14, 2006 #
As Eric Miraglia pointed out on his blog, our engineer Jenny Han is hard at work on the Auto Complete JavaScript. We’re planning on releasing consistently and frequently (though I can’t give dates yet, sorry!), so hang tight it’s coming.

Comment by Nate Koechley — February 14, 2006 #
cooooool!
i like this one…..

Comment by catCN — February 17, 2006 #
Please let me know, i really want to use it on my site.

Thanks.

Comment by bangalorelocal — February 20, 2006 #
I’m assuming that it’ll be closely tied to Yahoo! Connect, so will the code have some good examples?

Keep up the good work – you guys are cranking out some good tools!

Comment by Pat — February 27, 2006 #
Could you let us know approx when this particular sample will be released? Is it in the front of the queue or the back of the line? =)

Thanks!

another auto-complete i might use as a ref if this is not coming soon: http://www.papermountain.org/demos/live/

Comment by dan — February 27, 2006 #
Dan,

Yes it is in the front of the queue. And development has been and is in full swing on this component.

I cannot give you an exact release date, but we recognize it as super important and it will be soon.

See http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ydn-javascript/message/222 for a general statement about our roadmap policy.

Comment by Bill Scott — February 28, 2006 #
Just checking in… any updates?

Comment by dan — April 6, 2006 #
Any news on when Auto Complete will be added to the YUIL? Really looking forward to it!

Thanks

Comment by Jesse — April 11, 2006 #
any updates on this?

thx

Comment by Dieter — April 20, 2006 #
Really looking forward to seeing the library release for this! Sounds very useful indeed!

Comment by Tom Kerswill — May 5, 2006 #
Any news on the delivery of the autocomplete?
Thank you

Comment by sélim — May 6, 2006 #
Hello
I’m using wick ( http://wick.sourceforge.net/ )

any updates for this yahoo design pattern ?

thanks

Comment by olive — May 9, 2006 #
I was very happy to see this released and stuck it into a site on our dev server recently. It works great on Firefox, and I get nothing on any recent version of IE or Safari. Ummmm…. ? (I have plenty of ajax on my site, and it’s all cross-browser as much as possible.) I’m pretty sure this is something that Y! developers would have tested for, so I must be doing something wrong. I dont even know how to begin debugging though. I’ll start digging through the code, but I would have expected something akin to jog4javascript as a tracethrough debugging platform from a big toolset like this. Any luck?

Thanks…

dan

Comment by dan — May 24, 2006 #
ps: your examples do work in my IE browser, so it’s something in my implementation. still stuck playing browser debug tho…

Comment by dan — May 24, 2006 #
Dan,

Can you post your issue on the ydn-javascript group? This will be your best bet at getting a timely answer to your question.

Try:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ydn-javascript/

Comment by Bill Scott — May 24, 2006 #

Yahoo! User Interface Blog (YUIBlog)