ios - UITextField Autocomplete?

Question

I am trying to figure out if there is a way to implement an autocomplete functionality in a UITextField for specific values.

I know that the UITextField can do this using the iPhone dictionary (much like searching google in safari, etc), but I want to be able to programmatically have it correct to certain values that I specify.

How to do this?

Answer 1

Brett,

I did something very similar to this while working on a recent and rather large project. We had a constantly changing list of auto complete terms and built an auto-complete around them.

First, you'll want to make some type of auto-complete controller. It should take a string and return all possible auto complete terms for that string.

-(NSArray *)completionsForString:(NSString *)myString;

Then, check out the UIMenuController class. It's the class that shows the cut/copy/paste options in many applications. You can get the shared instance of it, populate the menu items yourself, and show it above the text field. The user can then simply tap the term they want.

In the end, the solution worked really well for our needs. I hope it works for you.