Autocomplete extender on a textbox without using webservice

I don't want to use a webservice to populate an autocomplete extender on a textbox. In this case, it's where the user is entering country name and I don't want to make a trip to the database every single time. I'd much rather keep a collection in session 开发者_StackOverflow中文版state and 'bind' the autocomplete to that.

Is it possible to set ServicePath and/or ServiceMethod to something in the codebehind as opposed to a webservice?

Regards kumar

Unfortunately, there is no direct option to do that other than hacking into javascript to stop the browser from making a call to get the list.

The only other choice I can see is to create a webservice & use EnableCaching property of AutoCompleteExtender, to make sure the result of the webservice is cached on the client, thereby avoiding calls to webservice (and database in turn).

EDIT: On a second thought, I think it could be possible to mark a public static method in your page with WebMethod attribute & set the ServicePath to your aspx page.

see if this helps - http://blogs.msdn.com/sburke/archive/2006/10/21/hint-components-that-use-web-services-with-asp-net-ajax-v1-0-beta.aspx

I think it should work. But am not sure, if the framework requires it to be the webservice.

Does your list of countries change, or vary by user? It doesn't seem to make sense to put this in session state, either. I don't see why you should hit the server for this.

Consider rendering all of your values directly into HTML and then using Javascript to autocomplete entirely on the client side.

You can use a local asmx file inside your existing web project and connect to that. There you can put any logic you require here so you don't have to hit a database if you don't want to. It's really just like another webpage that should have no problems accessing session state.

you can set the onclientpopulating attribute to your local javascript function something like onclientpopulating="onPopulating" and then in that js function provide the local data instead of hitting the web service. below is one of the implementations which i used which never hits the webservice. completionData variable holds all the data through which i iterate to find the match based on what the user entered in the text box. This is an old example. i probably would do it little differently if i implemented it now.

    function onPopulating(ace, args)
    {
       var prefixText = ace._currentCompletionWord();
       var filteredItems = GetFilteredItems(prefixText);
       ace._update(prefixText,filteredItems,false);
       args.set_cancel(true);

    }

    function GetFilteredItems(prefixText)
    {
        var filteredItems = []; 
        for (var nCount=0; nCount < completionData.length; nCount ++)
        {
            if (completionData[nCount].startsWith(prefixText))
            {
                Array.add(filteredItems,completionData[nCount]);

            }
        }
        return filteredItems; 
    }