I hope I did not sound selfish, I looked through the source and I am willing to help wherever my skills are good enough

1) Autoload or explicit flat values – the default way – utilizes a flat data structure and will work fine for regular use cases just like it is now.

2) An explicit “source” (or any other name) option – advanced mode – that takes the described data structure at startup and does not support autoloading by input textbox. It “persists” the adding/removing just like the default way, but by using a hidden select-tag with selected option values to make it easy to submit a form with a SmartTextBox included. Or if one would go that route, one could add the feature of “autoloading from a select-tag” as well, but maybe that is too much to ask?

I tried to implement the labelFormatter way. I advise against it, because you would need to reformat them not only for display, but also for searching, etc. It is too hairy and really only a bad hack.

containsValue: function (value) {
return (jQuery.inArray(value, this.getBoxValues()) > -1);
},

In such a scenario the first user could end up with invalid labels and once he submits the tagging-form, the serverside wont “know” the tag names.

This issue is even more complicated in a multi-language environment, where the labels of the smarttextbox autocompletion are translated into different languages at runtime.

All of this could be avoided if one could get the the Ids of the selected elements instead of the pure labels.

If changing the data structure is not feasible, how about some type of “labelformatter” callback?

$(“#myInput”).smartTextBox({
data: ['1/label1','2/label2'],
labelFormatter: function(item){ return item.substring(….)}
});

As a compromise, one could “render the ids into the data” and just format them differently for display in the autocompletion box.

$(“#myInput”).smartTextBox({
data: [{id:1, label:'label1'}{id:2, label:'label2'}]
});

on a structure like this

$(“#myInput”).smartTextBox({
data: ['label1','label2']
});

Knowing the only parameters for boxes are the label. Is there something I didnt see ?

Something like:

$(“#myInput”).smartTextBox({
data: [{id:1, label:'label1'}{id:2, label:'label2'}]
});

First of all, containsValue() was mysteriously broken. I simplified it to use standard javascript:

containsValue : function(value) {
return (this.getBoxValues().include(value));
},

This still works in IE6 – no need to go through the jQuery $(array), it seems.

Secondly, what still happened at this point was that if the item was already in the list, i.e. was not unique, and the user pressed enter anyway, the form got submitted once again. This was solved by changing onKeyDown on the InputElement class to:

onKeyDown : function(event){
if(!this.focused) return;
if($.inArray(event.keyCode, this.stb.options.submitKeys)>-1 &&
!this.stb.options.onlyAutocomplete &&
!(this.stb.options.uniqueValues && this.stb.containsValue(this.getValue()))) {
event.preventDefault();
this.saveAsBox();
} else {
if (event.keyCode == 13) {
event.preventDefault();
}
}
},

(basically, preventDefault if the user presses enter and the item is already in the list).

One last thing I need to fix is to do with the formatting of the autocomplete results/prompt box, but that’s probably purely a CSS fix.

Hope this helps!