title: jQuery Auto complete dropdown box
body: <p>After almost two days of searching and R&amp;D finally I've derived some of the following jQuery based auto-complete plugins which I find worth and suitable for my web-app.</p>
  <p>I've an MVC2 based web-app that I'm developing in ASP.Net C#. I've L2S (LINQ to SQL) as my DAL and I use service layer architecture to fetch data via the L2S.</p>
  <blockquote>
  <p>Now, I'm going to have some &quot;Look ups&quot;
  in which the list of selection might
  be big (i.e. 1000 or more records) so
  at times I want my auto-complete look
  up to be dynamic (i.e. I give the page
  from which it'll get the values and
  show in the dropdown) But there're
  simple ones also like 10-20 values
  which I want to render statically.</p>
  </blockquote>
  <p>In short I need something v.simple and straight forward auto-complete plugin which does the job without asking me too many questions or requiring too many .js files (of course excluding jQuery).</p>
  <p>Here's the summary of my R&amp;D along with my conclusion -</p>
  <blockquote>
  <ol>
  <li>
  <ul>
  <li>Simpler, static, has contains search(
  <strong><a href="https://frontensemble.com/hyjack/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://frontensemble.com/hyjack/</a></strong>)</li>
  </ul>
  </li>
  <li>
  <ul>
  <li>
  <ul>
  <li>Simple, static/dynamic, only starts with search(<br />
  <strong><a href="https://bassistance.de/jquery-plugins/jquery-plugin-autocomplete/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://bassistance.de/jquery-plugins/jquery-plugin-autocomplete/</a></strong>)</li>
  </ul>
  </li>
  </ul>
  </li>
  <li>
  <ul>
  <li>Complex, static/dynamic, combobox like contains search and much more (
  <strong><a href="https://jqueryui.com/autocomplete/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://jqueryui.com/demos/autocomplete/
  http://docs.jquery.com/UI/Autocomplete/</a></strong>
  )</li>
  </ul>
  </li>
  <li>
  <ul>
  <li>
  <ul>
  <li>
  <ul>
  <li>Simpler, static/dynamic, has contains search  (
  <strong><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20091019155637/http://dyve.net:80/jquery/?autocomplete" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://www.dyve.net/jquery?autocomplete</a></strong>
  )</li>
  </ul>
  </li>
  </ul>
  </li>
  </ul>
  </li>
  </ol>
  </blockquote>
  <p>*Pls consider the <em>(dot) above as my ratings. After some insights and demo reviews I've concluded that I'll go with #4 the dyve.net auto-complete plugin because it seems to be doing everything I need and most importantly its not complex.</em></p>
  <p>You'll find that #3 is rich in functionality and has much more but its big and gets complex so I've to opt it. FYI, #2 is nothing more but the primary version of #3 (but the only problem I faced is that it (#2) only has starts-with match, contains match is much better)</p>
  <p>Hope I'm on track.</p>
  <hr />
  <p>EDIT:</p>
  <blockquote>
  <p>Well after a night-out and more then
  20 hours of struggling and
  experimenting. I conclude that with
  jQuery I need to choose something
  which has a bigger support. With
  option #4 -The main problem came in
  when I wanted to populate a child dropdown based on parent
  It does populate dynamically but it persists the old items as well so while searching - the old ones will popup!
  I tried its cacheFlush, etc.. but it didn't worked. Finally, I posted my comment on the author's google code page and left it.</p>
  </blockquote>
  <ul>
  <li>My final take would be to use
  <strong>jQueryui</strong> - well I can do with some
  complexity when I'm getting too many
  other plugins who share the same
  library. So, my vote goes to <strong>option
  #3</strong></li>
  </ul>