IMPORTANT: This page refers to features that were added in VuFind 1.1; if you are using an earlier release, please upgrade.

Autocomplete functionality can be enabled, disabled or configured through settings in searches.ini. Each search type defined in your basic search type drop-down can be assigned its own custom autocomplete handler. The currently available handlers and configuration details can be found in the comments above the [Autocomplete] and [Autocomplete_Types] sections of searches.ini.

All of the autocomplete handlers can be found in the web/sys/Autocomplete folder of your VuFind installation. To create your own handler, simply implement the interface found in Interface.php in that folder. Ensure that the class name and filename match. You can then configure your custom handler just like any of the existing handlers, using the usual searches.ini settings described above.

Autocomplete handlers are standard VuFind 2.x plug-ins; more details can be found on the autosuggesters plugin page.

The current default autocomplete handler uses a fairly simple Solr lookup. Here are some more sophisticated approaches which may be worth pursuing:

The TermsComponent that is new in Solr 1.4 may be an appropriate Solr search handler to get suggestions from. But left hand truncation is still not possible with that.

On http://www.mattweber.org/2009/05/02/solr-autosuggest-with-termscomponent-and-jquery/ Matt Weber basically describes one way to set up autocomplete fields using TermComponent and JQuery.

On http://www.lucidimagination.com/blog/2009/09/08/auto-suggest-from-popular-queries-using-edgengrams/ Jay Hill outlines using EdgeNGrams to set up autocomplete against popular queries parsed from the Solr logs.