Extending script.aculo.us 1
One of the great features of Rails is its plugin system. It allows you to add new functionality to the framework without modifying the original source. On my current project, I had a need to create a CachingAutoCompleter and I wanted to do it within Rails.
Rails has a method that will work just fine, text_field_with_auto_complete. The problem lies in the fact that this method creates an Ajax.Autocompleter, whereas I need an AutoComplete object with my caching functionality. I could modify the script.aculo.us source for Ajax.Autocompletor and add my caching layer but surely there's gotta be a better way, something akin to the Rails plugin system.
Click the image below to watch a screencast (7MB) of how I accomplished this goal.
You can download the source of the CachingAutoCompleter here.
There are some cases in wich your caching functionality can be very useful, if the full list of options is displayed.
Nevertheless there may be some fields where the number of matches returned by the database are too big. For those cases a query with "limit" makes sence.
In the same data entry screen there may be the two types of fields. I think that in those cases the Ajax.Autocompleter.prototype.cache would be very usefull.
I think that you could complement your article to explain how to enable this functionality for some fields and disable it for others.
Thanks,
Ricardo