WebControl: Outlook-style predictive text / autocomplete

[Chris Green]

Is there a control out there for purchase which offers predictive text functionality similar to Outlook's autocomplete feature when e-mailing?

To me, this is a non-web feature and my gut reaction is no even if it was available it would be horrible. But a client wants this functionality so I am just making sure its not out there for purchase.

I came across this: http://www.codeproject.com/aspnet/combobox.asp which wraps functionality from http://www.deadbeef.com/index.php/dhtml_combobox in a webcontrol. Its a dropdownlist with autocomplete, but not really predictive text like Outlook.

I posted this in ASP.NET but this kind of functionality seems right up the AJAX alley (or drain... it sounds more like a drain cleaner :D ). Has anyone seen anything done like this on the web?

[gitter1226]

You're right, this is perrrfect for Ajax. There's a couple of important things to keep in mind when doing something like this though. For instance, you don't want to just query a database every time a field changes, especially if you have a high volume site. If 30 people are using the same page and can type 75 wpm, imagine that many queries a second... not fun.

***EDIT*****

The book AJAX HACKS from O'Reilly goes through a pretty good workup of Google style predictive text if you're interested.

Ignore the above sentence. This is what I get for reading more than one book at a time... :blush: The book I was actually referring to is Ajax in Action by Dave Crane and Eric Pascarello from Manning publishing. Sorry for the confusion. As an added bonus, this book does a terrific job of discussing how to best implement the Model-View-Controller design pattern for AJAX.

***EDIT*****

Good luck!

Jeff Gitter