Autocomplete - How to define DS

[augustodelucena]

Hi,

I'm trying to define an autocomplete field which will be filled by few items.

I've seen few related subjects guides/tutorials around and then I set this at share-config-custom:

<field id="id:prop_testauto" mandatory="false" read-only="false">
            <control template="/org/alfresco/components/form/controls/autocomplete.ftl">
              <control-param name="ds">{path}</control-param>
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I left it with {path} on purpose as I would like to know what should I put in the {path} to make it works.

I just didn't get how it works, what kind of file should be defined as my datasource.

Can it be a .TXT with a list of items in few lines? 

What am I missing?

[steven_okennedy]

Hi augustodelucena,

What version of Alfresco are you using?  Is the autocomplete.ftl you are referencing a standard component or a custom control you've added in?

Assuming that you're using a control that's built on the YUI2 Autocomplete and your ftl works in a similar fashion to the old control from the Forms FDK (e.g. like this https://code.google.com/p/alfresco-forms-service-examples/source/browse/trunk/share/source/web/WEB-I... ), then the value you pass to the control-param ds needs to be a valid argument for the YAHOO.util.XHRDataSource constructor.  This would be a url referencing a service that will return a JSON response in the format

{
  "results": 
  [
    {"value": "value1"},
    {"value": "value2"},
    {"value": "value3"}
  ]
}
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So you can simply create a new webscript (if you don't have one already) that will return a static list - or perhaps read a file to create the list - in the format above.  You would then use the url of this webscript as the parameter to your ds param.

Regards

Steven