Force selection in combobox/suggestionbox

[orik]

I would like to be able to force the user selection in combobox/suggestionbox to one of the items suggested.

I want the user to able to type only the prefixes of suggested items (enableManualInput is not really an option as I have a lot of items).

I can probably accomplish this by using a4j:support onblur event and validating, but this seems like an overhead.

Is there a better way to do this?

Thanks,

Ori

[ilya_shaikovsky]

Not sure that completelly get the point. You want the user to be able to type only some limited number of chars? And then to choose from list only?

[orik]

I want the user to be able to type in and select only items that appear in the drop down,

or in other words, for the combobox/suggestionbox to only accept input from the drop down.

For example,

if the drop down contains the following values:

"John"

"James"

The user will not be able to type in "P" or "Ji", only prefixes (and eventually all) of the items that appear in the drop down.

Hope this is clearer.

[orik]

PrimeFaces has this functionality in its autocomplete component, check out the forceSelection attribute.

http://www.primefaces.org:8080/prime-showcase/ui/autoCompleteBasic.jsf

[orik]

We eventually ended up using the combobox component and validating the input using a JS "onchange" handler.