Autocomplete: Fails when appendTo is detached from the DOM

Thanks for taking the time to contribute to the jQuery UI project! We're going to need a reduced test case that shows the issue that you're describing.

Also, be sure to test against the git version of both jQuery UI and jQuery to ensure the issue still exists. To get started you can use this boilerplate: http://jsfiddle.net/ZgAqH/ Open the link and click to "Fork" (in the top menu) to get started.

Here is some code the works with 1.8 but not 1.9:

http://jsfiddle.net/D6QCR/9/

This is happening because the node passed to

appendTo

is a detached DOM node. Therefore this line

this.document.find( this.options.appendTo || "body" )[ 0 ]

in the code block below will end up failing because the

appendTo

is not in the document.

		this.menu = $( "<ul>" )
			.addClass( "ui-autocomplete" )
			.appendTo( this.document.find( this.options.appendTo || "body" )[ 0 ] )
			.menu({
				// custom key handling for now
				input: $(),
				// disable ARIA support, the live region takes care of that
				role: null
			})
			.zIndex( this.element.zIndex() + 1 )
			.hide()
			.data( "ui-menu" );

I'm not sure this is something jQuery UI supports. scott_gonzalez?

Hmm, i hope that jQuery UI supports this. Here is my use case

$.ajax('/some.html', {
  success: function(someHtml) {
    var someHtml = $(someHtml);
    var complete = box.find('.complete');

    complete.find('input').autocomplete({
      appendTo: complete,
      source: ['hello', 'world']
    });

    someButton.click(function() {
      someHtml.appendTo('body');
    });
  }
});

This works great with 1.8.

Autocomplete: When appendTo is a jQuery object or a DOM element, don't search against the document. Fixes #8858 - Autocomplete: Fails when appendTo is detached from the DOM.

Changeset: dec844570fae5edf56876b760b9358fde2ecb5e7

@ushi I'm not sure if we'll do a 1.9.3 release, so you'll either need to wait for 1.10.0 or implement a workaround in your code. To work around this in 1.9, you can not set appendTo on creation, then immediately after you append to the body, change the appendTo option.