Auto complete/Suggest in Wordpress Form - autocomplete

Question

I'm placing a search form of 6 fields on my home page which includes a text box field named course. I want to show course suggestions while user typing. One more is, I want to show/hide some fields according to the option of first field dropdown. Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

You can use jQuery Auto Suggest which is included with WordPress : wp_enqueue_script
With this you can write a form that does a Ajax lookup to the the Ajax URL handler. Which you can add_action onto. AJAX in Plugins
So you can ajax lookup and then on the action side you can just perform a get_posts to match titles, or a raw sql Query. And return what is needed. edit your functions.php.
add_action('wp_enqueue_scripts', 'se_wp_enqueue_scripts');
function se_wp_enqueue_scripts() {
wp_enqueue_script('suggest');
}
add_action('wp_head', 'se_wp_head');
function se_wp_head() {
?>
<script type="text/javascript">
var se_ajax_url = '<?php echo admin_url('admin-ajax.php'); ?>';
jQuery(document).ready(function() {
jQuery('#se_search_element_id').suggest(se_ajax_url + '?action=se_lookup');
});
</script>
<?php
}
add_action('wp_ajax_se_lookup', 'se_lookup');
add_action('wp_ajax_nopriv_se_lookup', 'se_lookup');
function se_lookup() {
global $wpdb;
$search = like_escape($_REQUEST['q']);
$query = 'SELECT ID,post_title FROM ' . $wpdb->posts . '
WHERE post_title LIKE \'' . $search . '%\'
AND post_type = \'post_type_name\'
AND post_status = \'publish\'
ORDER BY post_title ASC';
foreach ($wpdb->get_results($query) as $row) {
$post_title = $row->post_title;
$id = $row->ID;
$meta = get_post_meta($id, 'YOUR_METANAME', TRUE);
echo $post_title . ' (' . $meta . ')' . "\n";
}
die();
}

Answer 2

Use ajax for both. You may have to write some mysql query to retrieve the required fields(post titles or whatever it is) from the table.