Autocomplete in User Input

Quick setup: My users are hobbyist plant-growers and they’re using my app to document their collections. They are including information like “genus, species, subspecies, etc.”

Many of these scientific names are long and a pain to manually type hundreds of times while documenting collections. It’s also not feasible for me to create a gigantic list of “choices” for users to select from, as there are many thousands of genera and species of plants in existence.

It would be nice if, once a genus or species are entered once, it could be used as an autocomplete/suggestion for other users inputting similar data.

Concrete example:
• User 1 adds “Sarracenia” as a genus input.
• User 2 comes along and wants to enter their Sarracenia, as well. They start typing “s,a,r…” and automagically, “Sarracenia” is surfaced as an option - spelled and formatted correctly for them to select from.

My example is clearly hyper-specific, but I can see this being a generally useful feature, as well.

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+1 for this, would love this feature and for now it seems like there’s no workaround that I know of.

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Right. This feature doesn’t exist for autocomplete…it only works for search component. I guess the only way to do this would be to have an inline list of An index of all genus, etc…search component could have users whittle away the list to the specific plant, then add a form button to the Index result to have them add it to their inventory.

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You could build a list of choices based on the already entered values. Also create a text entry component that fills the same column as the choice component. Then they can search through the choice component. If their plant is not in the list, they can type it in to the entry field.

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