The fact that the list of entries is filtered on the fly as the user types into the text box makes picking an entry from a large list possible very quickly. Even if users only remember parts of an entry name they can reduce the number of potential candidates dramatically by typing just a few characters. This is significantly different from other controls that only scroll to entries that start with what you type in, for example. In this article we'll see how the auto-complete box works and what options it offers; and although most people associate the control with string values only, we'll see that it's capable of handling far more than that and that it can work with any kind of data with little effort.
As always, you can download the complete source code at the end of the article. It contains all of the following samples as individual projects.
Basic usage
For the simplest scenario, you only need to provide the auto-complete box with an items source and process changes of the SelectedItem property either through data binding or by handling the SelectionChanged event. The source items do not necessarily need to be strings like in the following example. The control will automatically call the ToString() method on the items to create the text entries for the drop-down list, so if your data items override this method and a string representation is sufficient, you don't need to do anything else to get a working result. Alternatively, you can also hint the auto-complete box at what property shall be used for the string representation, as we'll see in a moment.
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