I am making an app (asp.net/c#) that will autosuggest a couple fields that users type in. Each user will end up building their own auto-suggest list. Every time they add an item, if it's a new word, it will get added to their list of auto-suggests, just like gmail.
I was wondering how most people go about this? Making a call to the server for every key-press doesn't seem very efficient? Should I make a huge xml file with one entry for each user? An xml file for each user? how would I cache this to make it efficient?
All sorts of questions, but what I am basically looking for is best practices. Thank you.
I would store the values in a database (where you are storing their user profiles maybe), and pull the values into ASP.NET Session when the user logs in. Then just use the values from the Session for the auto-complete values. This way you will only have to hit the database once when they log in.