Autocomplete improvements

[mnquintana]

Our current implementation of autocomplete kinda sucks. We should:

• Change to a different autocomplete gem / JS plugin (the current one is probably broken in Rails 4)
• Make it so that typing a space in the autocomplete field doesn't delete the entire query
• Removing a reserver's name (as an admin or staff) does not reset the reserver to your own ID
• Autocompleting a user search automatically searches for the user

[orenyk]

I'm not sure that the last behavior is wrong. If you don't put someone else's name in that field the app should assume that you're reserving for yourself; what other assumption can we make?

[squidgetx]

I think it's meant that the app should assume you're reserving for yourself (it currently doesn't)

[orenyk]

ohh I missed a "not". Yea, that makes more sense, thanks.

[orenyk]

I'm wondering if we can try and implement some kind of fuzzy search, which might also solve our space-breaking issue.

[squidgetx]

Possibly. The space breaking issue is tied in pretty closely to how the rails-jquery-autocomplete gem works: it queries a specific column(s) in the given table: once the space is added the text doesn't match any of the columns (though it would match concat(first_name + " " + last_name))

There's some amount of material on stackoverflow relating to this issue but nothing solid. The closest I saw was the suggestion to overwrite the get_autocomplete_items method to match our own SQL command but I couldn't get it to work.