Appcelerator: Possible to detect @mention in textArea

Question

So I successfully have a nice textArea setup to get user input that will post into a web form I have created. I want to add @mention functionality to the text area, so that if a user types @somename, as they are typing it will query a JSON web service to pull up some values of possible name matches.

My first starting point is to somehow detect changes in the textArea to see if a user is trying to @mention someone

Any thoughts or ideas on how to approach this?

Thank you!

Answer 1

To detect changes in text area you can use change event. Following code would help to start things :

var textArea = Ti.UI.createTextArea({
    borderWidth: 2,
    borderColor: '#bbb',
    borderRadius: 5,
    color: '#888',
    font: {fontSize:20, fontWeight:'bold'},
    textAlign: 'left',
    value: 'I am a textarea',
    top: 60,
    width: 300, height : 70
});
textArea.addEventListener("change", textAreaValueChanged);

function textAreaValueChanged() {
    var newTextAreaValue = textArea.value;
    // now parse this newTextAreaValue according to your need and hit webservice
}