rails3-jquery-autocomplete Populate drop down on initial focus

I'm trying to have the drop down list of items from autocomplete automatically populate on focus with all entries from a particular table when there is nothing in the autocomplete text field. Everything works perfectly with it except I need this one piece of functionality.

I've tried:

$('#activity_name').focus(function() {
  if (!$(this).val() || $(this).val() == '') {
    $(this).val('%');
    $(this).trigger("focus");
  }
})

Where #activity_name is the autocomplete_field_tag. You can tell from the value that I'm trying to get all the items in the table to show when the field is initially focused on.

I've altered the autocomplete_rails.js file to use 1+ letters instead of 2+ letters so it should be querying with just the % character (which I'm able to confirm by just typing % into the text field).

Here's the code I changed in autocomplete_rails.js:

search: function() {
  var a = c(this.value);
  if (a.length < 1) return ! 1
},

Any insight would be appreciated.

Start in defining the source.

You can actually refactor my workaround.

                    $("input#xiruki").autocomplete(
                    {
                        source: <%= raw Category.select("distinct description as value, code as name, id as ID").where("description ILIKE ?", "%#{params[:term]}%").to_json %>,
                        minLength: 0,
                        select: function (event, data) {
                            $(this).autocomplete('disable');
                        console.log(data.item);

                        }
                    })
                    .blur(function(){
                        $(this).autocomplete('enable');
                    })
                    .focus(function () {
                        $(this).autocomplete('search', '');
                    });

You can change the ILIKE term to LIKE because ILIKE is meant for PG only.