Smartest of the Stupid People

If you’ve never had the pleasure of working jQuery, than you need to stop what you are doing and go check it out.  Its a cool little JavaScript library that makes throwing some AJAX into your site a snap.

I’ve used jQuery Autocomplete before, and it generally looks something like this:

<script language=”javascript” >
$().ready(function() {
$(”.CLASSNAME”).autocomplete(JobTitles);
$(”#clear”).click(function() {
$(”:input”).unautocomplete();
});
});
</script>

Basically it takes my text box that i have set as class=”CLASSNAME” and in this example a javascript array called JOBTITLES and basically ’suggests’ values that match what they’ve type in so far. Very very handy tool.

I implemented it in a recent project where i was searching a list of names so people could easily search and select the name to add.  I had this all wrapped up in an update panel that actually resides in a web user control and had multiple instances of it due to it being printed out in a repeated. Everything worked great….

Then i noticed after i signed up one of the names, my auto-complete broke, WTF? Turns out the update panel does a partial postback that breaks the jQuery. You can find out more information about that here and here.

So in the end i updated my code to look like this:

<script type=”text/javascript” language=”javascript” >
function pageLoad() {
$(”.CLASSNAME”).autocomplete(JOBTITLES);

$(”#clear”).click(function() {
$(”:input”).unautocomplete();
});
}
</script>

… and that did the trick!

Also found this article: $(document).ready() and pageLoad() are not the same!

General .NET, jQuery