Welcome!

I’m a software professional with 10 years experience spanning the full development life cycle–especially requirements analysis and database development. I’ve worked for small startups, large corporations, and government entities. My current interest is developing web applications with Ruby on Rails and related tools (MySQL, CSS, nginx/Passenger, Capistrano, Shoulda, git).

I collaborate with graphic designers to create solutions for business owners' websites. I also support general business computing needs.

jQueryUI Autocomplete versus auto_complete

I recently decided to upgrade the aging auto_complete plugin with jQueryUI’s Autocomplete widget.

It was mostly smooth sailing, but I had a bit of trouble getting the styling to look correct. jQueryUI was appending the Autocomplete results to the end of the html body, instead of after the text input where the user types his search query. This behavior seemed to contradict the documentation, so I submitted a bug report. It turns out this is intended behavior to account for the fact that IE does not recognize z-index, but the search results must obviously appear on top of all other page elements.

Fortunately, you can easily modify the default behavior of the search event and append it where you want it. I probably broke IE6 support, but if Google can drop it, why not?