vb.net - How to SuggestAppend a ComboBox containing a string

Question

Goal

I'd like to have my ComboBox items suggest and append its items when something is contained in them, not just via the StartsWith function.

My ComboBox is bound to a DataView which contains clients [CompanyName], [Address], [City] in a long concatenation.

I want my users to be able to type in the city and still find the records which matches with all of the fields above. I know this is possible with Infragistics but I don't have that package.

Search Term: "Sher"

• Costco, 123 1st Avenue, Sherbrooke
• Provigo, 344 Ball Street, Sherbrooke
• Sherbox, 93 7th Street, Montreal

Is this possible in VB.Net or should I be searching for something else?

Answer 1

I did some research and found the following question:

Override Winforms ComboBox Autocomplete Suggest Rule

In that question they reffer to another question:

C# AutoComplete

Let's quote the best answer from that question

The existing AutoComplete functionality only supports searching by prefix. There doesn't seem to be any decent way to override the behavior.

Some people have implemented their own autocomplete functions by overriding the OnTextChanged event. That's probably your best bet.

For example, you can add a ListBox just below the TextBox and set its default visibility to false. Then you can use the OnTextChanged event of the TextBox and the SelectedIndexChanged event of the ListBox to display and select items.

This seems to work pretty well as a rudimentary example:

public Form1()
{
    InitializeComponent();


    acsc = new AutoCompleteStringCollection();
    textBox1.AutoCompleteCustomSource = acsc;
    textBox1.AutoCompleteMode = AutoCompleteMode.None;
    textBox1.AutoCompleteSource = AutoCompleteSource.CustomSource;
}

private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    acsc.Add("[001] some kind of item");
    acsc.Add("[002] some other item");
    acsc.Add("[003] an orange");
    acsc.Add("[004] i like pickles");
}

void textBox1_TextChanged(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
    listBox1.Items.Clear();
    if (textBox1.Text.Length == 0)
    {
    hideResults();
    return;
    }

    foreach (String s in textBox1.AutoCompleteCustomSource)
    {
    if (s.Contains(textBox1.Text))
    {
        Console.WriteLine("Found text in: " + s);
        listBox1.Items.Add(s);
        listBox1.Visible = true;
    }
    }
}

void listBox1_SelectedIndexChanged(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
    textBox1.Text = listBox1.Items[listBox1.SelectedIndex].ToString();
    hideResults();
}

void listBox1_LostFocus(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
    hideResults();
}

void hideResults()
{
    listBox1.Visible = false;
}

There's a lot more you could do without too much effort: append text to the text box, capture additional keyboard commands, and so forth.