Key up/key down in textarea's should optionally not toggle auto-complete

Do you have an example of how this provides a useful interface?

In my use case I have users creating comments which are multiple lines and I want to allow them to use the up/down arrow keys to navigate through them if they wish.

I've "fixed" this in my code by taking out the detection of the up/down keypresses from our copy of the jQuery UI library so that they don't scroll through the auto-complete list at all so they then have to use the mouse to select options from the auto-complete list.

Some people might well like the current behaviour with text areas and some people might prefer to scroll through the list only when its already visible to the user - so that's why I think an option - ideally with those two options as well as making it so the arrow keys only scroll through the text area would be great.

If I haven't answered your question please let me know.

You're autocompleting individual words from full sentences? I assume you're building custom logic for this, part of that custom logic can call stopImmediatePropagation() on the keydown event to avoid the autocomplete from handling it. You need to bind this event handler before initializing the autocomplete widget and you should only stop propagation when the menu is closed.

Replying to [comment:3 scott.gonzalez]:

You're autocompleting individual words from full sentences?

No we are auto-completing the full sentence as one unit.

So for example allowing the user to autocomplete 'Needs reviewing by Bill Smith.'.

I assume you're building custom logic for this, part of that custom logic can call stopImmediatePropagation() on the keydown event to avoid the autocomplete from handling it. You need to bind this event handler before initializing the autocomplete widget and you should only stop propagation when the menu is closed.

We aren't building any custom logic on the clientside - we are leaving basically everything (other than the source attribute and the position) as their default auto-complete values.

When the user hasn't typed anything yet, do you want them to be able to see the full list of options by pressing the down arrow?

Replying to [comment:5 scott.gonzalez]:

When the user hasn't typed anything yet, do you want them to be able to see the full list of options by pressing the down arrow?

You guys should decide what makes sense for you in that case.

You're asking for a change in behavior. I'm trying to find out if what you want is actually what you're asking for.

For our usage we only want the arrow keys to affect the text area and not to affect the popup list.

I have the same issue in a bit different scenario: I'm using textarea with attached autocomplete plugin to provide a sort of intellisense so that autocomplete suggestions are displayed only when entered term ends with certain character(s). So whenever autocomplete suggestions are not displayed I want user to be able to use arrow keys to serve default behaviour of the textarea.

Workaround I'm currently using is modified source code of autocomplete:

                  // code skipped ...
                  .bind( "keydown.autocomplete", function( event ) {
                  // code skipped ...
				case keyCode.UP:
					self._move( "previous", event );
                                        // when menu is open and has focus
					if ( self.menu.active ) {
					    // prevent moving cursor to beginning of text field in some browsers
					    event.preventDefault();
					}
				    break;
				case keyCode.DOWN:
					self._move( "next", event );
                                        // when menu is open and has focus
					if ( self.menu.active ) {
					    // prevent moving cursor to beginning of text field in some browsers
					    event.preventDefault();
					}
					break;

I've written a partial fix at: https://github.com/meh-cfl/jquery-ui/blob/master/ui/jquery.ui.autocomplete.js, comments are welcome but I want to test it and hopefully write a unit test before pushing it to the main tree.

I've added some unit tests for this and created pull request #443: https://github.com/jquery/jquery-ui/pull/443.

A second pull request for this: https://github.com/jquery/jquery-ui/pull/445

#7806 is a duplicate of this ticket.

Autocomplete: Don't invoke a search from arrow keys when the element can have multi-line text. Fixes #7639 - Key up/key down in textarea's should optionally not toggle auto-complete.

Changeset: 06f6fa8524a905ec8027b8ba756eb199f2591336

#7963 is a duplicate of this ticket.

Autocomplete: Don't invoke a search from arrow keys when the element can have multi-line text. Fixes #7639 - Key up/key down in textarea's should optionally not toggle auto-complete.

Changeset: 9668cb850ef97e39822cb3ef0d0ea27ff0c1fe6e