I went to the jQuery autocomplete plugin page that uses the Jorn Zaefferer plugin and downloaded the zipped examples. It has a lot of functionality, and was relatively easy to use. The problem is if I try to set the minChars value to anything but one or zero. If I do this, without making any other changes, I get nothing at all in the suggest box that should appear once I've typed the number of keys specified by the minChars option. I change it back to one or zero, and it works. This is really frustrating. I noticed that none of the many examples shown on the demo page used anything but minChars: 0 (or nothing, which defaults to one). Does anyone have an answer to this issue? I switched over to using the jQuery UI autocomplete, and this did work with the minChars, but it lacks a lot of the functionality that Jorn's autocomplete has.

 

I did some more testing, and found that inside the 'request' function, where the statement:

var data = cache.load(term);

is executed, if I set the minChars value to one or zero, 'data' has a value. If I set it to two, 'data' is null.

 

OK, I've learned that both plugins are developed by Jorn, but the version I'm talking about didn't come bundled within the jQuery UI package, and had Jorn's name in the credits. The UI version credited an AUTHORS.txt file, which had many authors listed.