Control triggering of autoSuggestBehaviour

The autoSuggestBehaviour is a very cool demonstration of AJAXy features. It’s a useful visual hint for the user and allows the user to quickly select a valid value for an input component. However, there is often a requirement to control the triggering of the autoSuggestBehaviour. For e.g. based on a minimum no. of characters typed in by the user. This can be achieved through a hacky Javascript solution at least until Oracle decides to add a word length control property to the ootb component. Hat tip to Eugene for most of the code here. I have merely tweaked his code with a few bug fixes to get this working.

So without further ado, here’s the javascript that I put together to achieve this. Note that the code may still have bugs. One issue I have noticed is that if you quickly type in the keyword (longer than trigger length) and without pause backspace to a length smaller than your trigger, the popup still gets triggered.

Trigger the initCustomAutoSuggest function on page load – say using a load clientListener.

         
         var initialized = false; //Initialization flag           

         function customAutoSuggest(e) {   
                  var src = e.getSource();
                  var len = AdfDhtmlEditableValuePeer.GetContentNode(e.getSource()).value.length;

                  var peer = src.getPeer();
                  console.log('Text length::' + len);
                  //Check for the word length
                  if(len > 3)
                  {
                    console.log('Trigger auto suggest');
                    AdfAutoSuggestBehavior.prototype.originalAutoSuggest(e);                      
                  }
                  else 
                  {
                    /* These were required to fix some behaviour issues like
                     * popup not closing etc. 
                     */
                    this._cancelSmartListTimer();                    
                    if(this._timerId) {                         
                        AdfPage.PAGE.rescheduleTimer(this._timerId, 500);                         
                    }
                    /* If content length is less than required count
                     * then hide the popup
                     */
                    if(peer.isPopupVisible(src, AdfAutoSuggestBehavior._POPUP_PANEL_ID))
                    {
                        peer.hidePopup(src, AdfAutoSuggestBehavior._POPUP_PANEL_ID);
                    }
                  }
        }

        initCustomAutoSuggest = function () {  
            AdfAutoSuggestBehavior.prototype._maxSuggestedItems = 10;
            if (!initialized) {               

                /*Make a copy of the original autoSuggest behaviour for key up*/
                AdfAutoSuggestBehavior.prototype.originalAutoSuggest =  
                                                  AdfAutoSuggestBehavior.prototype._fireKeyUp;  

                /*user custom behavuour for key up action */
                AdfAutoSuggestBehavior.prototype._fireKeyUp = customAutoSuggest;

                /* Find the input component */
                var inp = AdfPage.PAGE.findComponentByAbsoluteId("it1"); 
                /* Undo any clientListeners that may already have been added 
                 * to the input text. This code needs cleanup as it potentially
                 * removes any clientListener that the developer may have added
                 * in 
                 */
                inp.setProperty("clientListeners", null);  

                AdfAutoSuggestBehavior.prototype.initialize(inp);  
                initialized = true;  
             }  
        }