Archives

Archives / 2009 / July
  • SharePoint Search-as-You-Type with jQuery

    Already since a long time I’ve been thinking about a web part that would search-as-you-type using SharePoint’s search engine. The idea behind this concept is that while you’re typing a query in the search box, asynchronously the query is already executed and the results are being displayed. Every time the query is changed, the results will be updated dynamically. This will allow users to see the results without going to the Search Results page, and even more: they don’t have to go back to alter their query. In such a scenario you want to avoid full page postbacks of course, so AJAX-techniques have to be used to accomplish this. A while back my first approach would be to make use of ASP.NET AJAX to build the necessary functionality in a web part for example. But during the last couple of weeks I’ve become a really big fan of using jQuery Javascript Library in SharePoint sites, and it happens to be that the search-as-you-type functionality can be created with the help of jQuery very easily. The beauty of this solution is that everything is happening on the client (in the web browser), so there is absolutely no requirement to deploy something to the server (nowadays this seems to be called ‘Assembly Free’).