database queried constraints (text / drop down)

[abruzzi]

So I'm looking into querying our financial system to provide a list constraint for the "Vendor" field we are going to add to our purchasing documents.  This seems easy based on code I've already found here, but the problem is that list will be very long.  I'd like a control that works similar to the ajax text/drop boxes you see all over the web that filter the suggestions based on the characters already typed.  I've written those controls before, but not in conjunction with Alfresco.  If anyone has written similar, or can suggest an approach, I'd love some help.

thanks,

Geof

[rliu]

If you already have an efficient way of accessing the data, then you'll have to attach an onkeypress event listener that will submit a search.

If you don't want to make the service call for each keystroke, then you'll have to pass the entire list to the client on the original page load and perform the filtering there.

The latter approach would work better if the list is relatively static.