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Improved ComboBox Demo

By barneyb on May 17, 2007

After Koen (a coworker) pointed out that my online ComboBox demo was rather user-unfriendly (like how you just had to "know" to type an 'a' in the fields), I threw some instructions around it. It's available at /web/widgets/, as before. There's also a new distro at /web/widgets/widgets-b2231.zip, and the project page has been updated as well.  The actual code is unchanged, only the demo file has been updated.

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5 responses to “Improved ComboBox Demo”

  1. Koen
    Koen
    May 17, 2007 at 1:47 pm |

    Much better.

  2. Matthew Lesko
    Matthew Lesko
    May 20, 2007 at 5:17 pm |

    For DHTML combo boxes, or anything DHTML/AJAX related, I recommend looking at Ext (http://extjs.com/). Ext provides a unified API atop either Prototype/Scriptaculous, YUI or jQuery. The combo box demo is here http://www.extjs.com/deploy/ext/examples/form/combos.html

    The API is well organized and documented. The site provides numerous examples and an active forum. I'm not necessarily a true believer; but, what's there I have found more accessible than any other OSS solution I've come across.

  3. barneyb
    barneyb
    May 20, 2007 at 9:43 pm |

    Thanks Matthew; looks slick. Wasn't around in 2005 when I needed one though. ;)

  4. David
    David
    July 6, 2009 at 1:36 pm |

    Hi. I was wondering if you've noticed the bug where if you use the mouse pointer to select the item from the list, the item only populates the input text box 50% of the time. The other 50% of the time, nothing happens. You have to keep trying it over and over to get it to break. So basically, the onclick portion seems buggy. I'm not sure how to fix it. I know this script is old, but it is still very useful. Any help you could offer would be appreciated.

  5. barneyb
    barneyb
    July 6, 2009 at 2:11 pm |

    David,

    Yeah, there's a bug of some sort in the click handling. I haven't been able to narrow it down, though I'll admit I haven't tried particularly hard because pretty much everywhere I use it are keyboard-centric UIs (so up/down arrows, esc, enter instead of a mouse). These days, most of the places I need autocomplete I now use a hacked up version of the jQuery UI control, so I'm probably not going to being investing any significant effort into the ComboBox unless it becomes an issue with one of those apps that already use it.

    The event handling stuff is pretty simple; that's where the problem is, not in the internal functionality that actually does dropdown/input stuff. My gut tells me that it probably has something to do with child elements within the dropdown items and the event bubbling stuff that JavaScript does, but it's been years since I've looked at it.