AutoCompleteBox-like control

[Alex Fan]

Hi

I have seen a couple of people asking for this from Telerik already and I do understand that we can use ComboBox to achieve similar functionality. But by using radcombobox, it still looks like a dropdown list which doesn't fit into the place where a textbox-like control is much more preferable. The problems that I have are :

1, dropdown button cannot be hidden
2, when user starts typing, it doesn't dropdown the options automatically
3, it doesn't have typeahead, which means in the scenario a large set of options is involved, we cannot quickly type in a few characters and they get sent to webserver, then the smaller and filtered set of options is returned to client for autocomplete selection
4, how can I have multi-column in the dropdown area?

Could we have a solution for this? Thanks a lot.

Regards,
Alex

[George]

Hi Alex,

 
Straight to your questions:

1. The DropDown button can be hidden, but you need to edit the template of the RadComboBox. You could remote the dropdown button manually.
2. In order to open the dropdown when it is focused, I would suggest you to use RadComboBox.OpenDropDownOnFocus property to True. You could refer to our online demos - http://demos.telerik.com/silverlight/#ComboBox/Configurator
3. I would suggest you to refer to the Valeri Hristov's blog - Auto-complete ComboBox with WCF Service.
4. I would suggest you to set your custom ItemTemplate. Please, refer to the following link - http://www.telerik.com/help/silverlight/radcombobox-grid-like-dropdown.html

I hope this helps. 

Best wishes,
George
the Telerik team

[Kakone]

Hello,

It would be nice if we could hide the DropDown button with a simple property on the RadComboCox class instead of to edit the template.

Cordially,
Stephane.

[George]

Hello,

Thank you for your feedback, we will consider your suggestion. 

Greetings,
George
the Telerik team

[Alex Fan]

If we do have that property, that will be great! :) but just need to fix the dropdown logic to make it auto expend like AutoCompleteBox

Can I also suggest to have another 2 properties for result population to make it like AutoCompleteBox: MinimumPrefixLength, MinmumDelay?

Thanks a lot.

[John]

Another vote for the MinimumPrefixLength and the hidden dropdown button.

Is there a work-around for the MinimumPrefixLength?  I truly need this property.  My gridview itemsSource is executed based on user's typing to that combobox. 

Thanks

[George]

Hello John,

 
Attached you can find a sample. I hope this helps.

Kind regards,
George
the Telerik team

[Jonathon]

Hi,

I get an error: return match(o as string); is a null reference exception. This only happens when I use a collection of objects I created rather than just using strings. Is there a way to make this work for any object?

Thanks,

Jonathon

[George]

Hello Jonathon,

The provided project is only example that is made to work with strings, but you could modify it as well. Meanwhile, we are working on autocompletebox control and it suits your needs. Most probably we will announce the control in Q1.

Best wishes,
George
the Telerik team

[Jonathon]

Thank you George.

I modified the project so that it works with objects, and just overrode the ToString() function for my class to display the value I want displayed.

Glad to hear there will be an official AutoCompleteBox control.

Jonathon

[Juliana]

Hi there,
I also modified the project to work with collection of objects.This works rather fine, but I can't manage to set predefined selected value, for ex. loaded value from db.
Is there any way to set up selected value if nothing is typed yet?

[Juliana]

Can anybody help me?