Using SPServices with jQueryUI’s Autocomplete Function on InfoPath Forms in SharePoint

Yes, that title says using jQueryUI on InfoPath forms in SharePoint. InfoPath forms are fantastic, except when they just aren’t quite able to do what you want. While InfoPath can help you take your SharePoint list forms to a whole new level, there may be times when you want to add some behavior to those forms which InfoPath simply doesn’t offer.

Guess what? jQuery and jQueryUI can come to the rescue in some of those cases, just as it can with the standard list forms.

I recently worked with a client to do a relatively simple thing, but it was a huge hit. They had a SharePoint list had a Single line of text column, to which the user could add whatever they wanted. However, there was a desire to make suggestions as the user typed, based on the contents of a different list, which had thousands of items.

A dropdown doesn’t make sense in that situation, because there are simply too many items. They also wanted to show matches to what the user had typed, regardless where those characters occurred in the list item.

This is a perfect situation in which to use the idea of autocomplete. We all are familiar with this idea, if not the actual term. You probably see it in action every single day as you use a search engine. As you type your search term(s), the search engine shows suggestions, probably based on some fairly sophisticated algorithms.

Here’s an example from Bing:

and from Google:

(I can’t help but point out that Google was more on the mark in guessing that I was searching for SPServices, but hey, who’s counting?)

When InfoPath forms are rendered in the browser, they are built of ordinary markup just like any other page, albeit fairly complicated markup, driven by a lot of script.  That doesn’t mean that you can’t add some script of your own as well to add additional capabilities. There are a few peculiarities to this situation, though, which you need to handle.

Here’s a slightly dumbed down version of the script we ended up with.

window.onload = function() {
  window.setTimeout(readyCall, 1000);
}

function readyCall(){

  var externalParties = [];

  $().SPServices({
    operation: "GetListItems",
    listName: "External Parties",
    CAMLViewFields: "",
    async: false,
    completefunc: function (xData, Status) {
      $(xData.responseXML).SPFilterNode("z:row").each(function() {
        externalParties.push($(this).attr("ows_Title"));
      });
    }
  });

  //<input tabIndex="0" title="" class="q_zwfUqJo2fRthHnM4_0 as_zwfUqJo2fRthHnM4_0 b9_zwfUqJo2fRthHnM4_0" id="ctl00_m_g_a226da68_1383_40e3_8410_1ada27d49dcf_FormControl0_V1_I1_T2" aria-invalid="true" style="position: relative;" onfocus="return (TextBox.OnFocus(this, event));" onblur="return (TextBox.OnBlur(this, event));" onpropertychange="return (TextBox.OnPropertyChange(this, event));" type="text" OriginalId="V1_I1_T2" FormId="ctl00_m_g_a226da68_1383_40e3_8410_1ada27d49dcf_FormControl0" ViewDataNode="3" direction="ltr" wrapped="true" ScriptClass="TextBox" VCARD_NAME="91161f891e59461042587839b2504693728ce05a" ?=""/>
  $("input[id$='FormControl0_V1_I1_T2'], input[id$='FormControl0_V1_I1_T3']").autocomplete({
    source: externalParties,
    minLength: 3
  });
}

When InfoPath forms load in the browser, they don’t load with the rest of the page, but instead they are loaded slightly afterward in what amounts to an asynchronous load. Because of that, using $(document).ready(), our trusted jQuery friend, doesn’t work. Instead, as you can see in lines 1-3, we simply wait for 1000 milliseconds (1 second) before we run our script. We found that this was an adequate amount of wait time for our particular form; you might need to adjust this.

In lines 9-19, we use my SPServices library to call the Lists Web Service, using the GetListItems operation. This operation simply reads items from the list based upon the criteria you specify. Once we have the data, we push each of the Title column values into an array called externalParties.

Finally, we call the jQueryUI function autocomplete, using two selectors. In line 21 above, which is commented out, you can see an example of the markup for one of the input elements rendered in the InfoPath form. One of the hardest parts of all of this was to figure out what selector to use. We settled on looking for an input element where the id contained ‘FormControl0_V1_I1_T2’.  (We actually added the autocomplete behavior to two columns in the form, thus the second selector for ‘FormControl0_V1_I1_T3’.)

We added this script into the newifs.aspx and editifs.aspx pages using a trusty Content Editor Web Part (CEWP). Since this was SharePoint 2010, and because it makes for far better code management, we stored the script in a separate file and referenced it using the Content Link.

Bingo-bango, we had a nice, little additional piece of functionality which made the users very happy. This is an example where thinking about all of the tools at your disposal and how you might glue them together into the right solution to get the job done can be the right approach rather than a lot of custom coding.

<UPDATE dateTime=”2011-08-25T23:51″>

My partner in crime for this exercise was Marcel Meth (@marcelmeth), and he’s done a post on it, too, which you can read here. I was able to steal his image of the results, which I’ve added above. Note that the image is not showing the real data but our test data, which was simply a list of the 3000 or so major cities and towns in the US.

</UPDATE>

<UPDATE dateTime=”2011-08-26T09:25″>

I got a question in the comments below about how we added the script to the InfoPath page, and I wanted to add those details here.

• First, we opened each form in the browser, which launched it in a dialog box.
• We got the actual URL of the page in the dialog by right-clicking and looking at its properties. The NewForm was newifs.aspx and the EditForm was editifs.aspx (as I mention above).
• We opened the form page directly in a new browser window and used the toolpaneview=2 Query String parameter trick to put the page into edit mode. This allows you to edit a list form page and add Web Parts to it.
• We added the CEWP, and put the reference to our script file in the Content Link.
• Apply and done.

</UPDATE>