jQuery "Autocomplete" plugin is messing up the order of my data
- by Max Williams
I'm using Jorn Zaefferer's Autocomplete plugin on a couple of different pages. In both instances, the order of displayed strings is a little bit messed up.
Example 1: array of strings: basically they are in alphabetical order except for General Knowledge which has been pushed to the top:
General Knowledge,Art and Design,Business Studies,Citizenship,Design and Technology,English,Geography,History,ICT,Mathematics,MFL French,MFL German,MFL Spanish,Music,Physical Education,PSHE,Religious Education,Science,Something Else
Displayed strings:
General Knowledge,Geography,Art and Design,Business Studies,Citizenship,Design and Technology,English,History,ICT,Mathematics,MFL French,MFL German,MFL Spanish,Music,Physical Education,PSHE,Religious Education,Science,Something Else
Note that Geography has been pushed to be the second item, after General Knowledge. The rest are all fine.
Example 2: array of strings: as above but with Cross-curricular instead of General Knowledge.
Cross-curricular,Art and Design,Business Studies,Citizenship,Design and Technology,English,Geography,History,ICT,Mathematics,MFL French,MFL German,MFL Spanish,Music,Physical Education,PSHE,Religious Education,Science,Something Else
Displayed strings:
Cross-curricular,Citizenship,Art and Design,Business Studies,Design and Technology,English,Geography,History,ICT,Mathematics,MFL French,MFL German,MFL Spanish,Music,Physical Education,PSHE,Religious Education,Science,Something Else
Here, Citizenship has been pushed to the number 2 position.
I've experimented a little, and it seems like there's a bug saying "put things that start with the same letter as the first item after the first item and leave the rest alone". Kind of mystifying. I've tried a bit of debugging by triggering alerts inside the autocomplete plugin code but everywhere i can see, it's using the correct order. it seems to be just when its rendered out that it goes wrong.
Any ideas anyone?
max
EDIT - reply to Clint
Thanks for pointing me at the relevant bit of code btw. To make diagnosis simpler i changed the array of values to ["carrot", "apple", "cherry"], which autocomplete re-orders to ["carrot", "cherry", "apple"].
Here's the array that it generates for stMatchSets:
stMatchSets = ({'':[#1={value:"carrot", data:["carrot"], result:"carrot"}, #3={value:"apple", data:["apple"], result:"apple"}, #2={value:"cherry", data:["cherry"], result:"cherry"}], c:[#1#, #2#], a:[#3#]})
So, it's collecting the first letters together into a map, which makes sense as a first-pass matching strategy. What i'd like it to do though, is to use the given array of values, rather than the map, when it comes to populating the displayed list. I can't quite get my head around what's going on with the cache inside the guts of the code (i'm not very experienced with javascript).
