C# Textbox Search Autocomplete

Question

I have a textbox used to type in strings and display all the avaiable results in this textbox.The current code like follows:

private void Form_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    TextBox.AutoCompleteMode = AutoCompleteMode.Suggest;
    TextBox.AutoCompleteSource = AutoCompeteSource.CustomSource;
}

private void TextBox_TextChanged(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    TextBox t = sender as TextBox;
    if(t != null)
    {
        if(t.Text.Length > = 1)
        {
            AutoCompleteStringCollection collection = new AutoCompleteStringCollection();
            collection.AddRange(s.Name);
            this.TextBox.AutoCompleteCustomSource = collection;
        }
    }
}

In the above code, s.Name is the source of all the strings I want to search. It shall work only I correctly typed the first letter of the string. For example. One of the s.Name may be ABCDEF I want it avaiable when I type any sub string of it, maybe EF or BC but not only AB or ABC. How should I do this? Thanks!

Answer 1

I am not going to help you like giving all code, so that you can copy or paste. So I am going to give an idea.. Check out the AutoCompleteSource, AutoCompleteCustomSource and AutoCompleteMode properties.

textBox1.AutoCompleteMode = AutoCompleteMode.Suggest;
textBox1.AutoCompleteSource = AutoCompleteSource.CustomSource;

    private void textBox1_TextChanged(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        TextBox t = sender as TextBox;
        if (t != null)
        {
            //say you want to do a search when user types 3 or more chars
            if (t.Text.Length >= 1)
            {
                //SuggestStrings will have the logic to return array of strings either from cache/db
                string[] arr = SuggestStrings(t.Text);

                AutoCompleteStringCollection collection = new AutoCompleteStringCollection();
                collection.AddRange(arr);

                this.textBox1.AutoCompleteCustomSource = collection;
            }
        }
    }

Hope it helped. Notify me if you have not understood yet. For more information, you can like this article... http://www.c-sharpcorner.com/article/autocomplete-textbox-in-C-Sharp/