How to use ajax with autocomplete in jquery?

Trying to use JQuery's autocomplete with ajax call for results

• Well I have a 50000+ row table so I can't load all rows into each page for the user to use autocomplete, so I am trying to use an ajax call via the extraParams parameter but don't know: 1) What format to make the results display in on the page being called via ajax (get-dropdown-results.xml in this case) 2) How to get these results into the dropdown Here's my current source: $("input#autocomplete-field").autocomplete( "/ajax/get-dropdown-results.xml",{ delay:0, minChars:3, matchContains:true, matchSubset:false, max:100, extraParams: { q: function () { return escape($("input#autocomplete-field").val()); } } }); I am running firebug so I can see the ajax calls are being made correctly (/ajax/get-dropdown-results.xml?q=whatever-they-typed) but I don't know where to put code to handle the returned text.

• Answer:

  I assume that you use http://dyve.net/jquery/?autocomplete. This plugin will create drop-down popup for you automatically. However it expects results to be in plain text format, not XML. Try returning results separated by line ends: foo\n bar\n baz\n