Erikk Ross AIO

In this video, I show how to build a simple autocomplete search box. You have probably seen this feature on popular sites such as Netflix, Google, Hulu and Adobe. When you start to type in a search box, you get results returned immediately that match what you typed.

I used PHP, MySQL and jQuery to create this example.

What you need to do in order to get this to work:

In order to get this working on your site, you will need to follow a few steps.

1. Setup your database. You can use a database you already have or create a new one. If you already have a database and table created you can skip this step. You can view my other MySQL tutorials for more details on setting up a database.
   
   
2. Modify the include/dbconn.php file. You will need to modify this file to connect to your database. You will need to provide your server name, username, password and database name.
   
   
3. Possibly make changes to get_customers.php. You will most likely have to make some changes to this file as well in order to use your own table name.
   
   For example, on line 9 my query looks like this:
   $query = "SELECT first_name, last_name FROM Customers WHERE last_name LIKE '%" . $queryString . "%' ORDER BY last_name, first_name";
   
   You will have to change that line of code to match your database table and column names.
   
   You will also need to modify this line of code from get_customers.php:
   echo '<li onclick="fill(\'' . $row['first_name'] . ' ' . $row['last_name'] . '\');">' . $row['first_name'] . ' ' . $row['last_name'] . '</li>';
   

   
   You will need to change $row['first_name'] and $row['last_name'] to match the name of your columns.

Watch Video | View live example | Autocomplete Code