Those little drop down things

[AdaHacker]

I've seen ways to do this, but I lost the info a while ago. I wouldn't ask, except that I have no idea what they're called or where to start looking.

What I want in one of those little drop-down windows with all the different choices. I mean the kind that appear after you start typing something and disappear when you're done. For example, the box with the recent URLs when you type an address in Internet Explorer. You start typing (e.g. "

http://www.ya")

and this box pops up under the URL text box with a list of pages starting with what you typed ("

http://www.yahoo.com",

"

http://www.yaya.com",

whatever). I want to do a variant of that, which will let my users type part of an ID number and match it to a list of possibilities in the database.

What are these things called and how do I do them? I would imagine there's some control for them. What is it and where do I find it?
(PS - I just looked at the preview. Does anyone else find it annoying that the fake URLs are being turned into actual links?)

 

[bateman23]

Hi AdaHacker,

I think you are searching for the AutoComplete feature,
(first introduced with IE 5.0)
Look at this site - it describes the API you can use to implement this feature to a text- or combobox):

http://www.mvps.org/vbnet/code/textapi/shautocomplete.htm

bateman23

 

[AdaHacker]

Hmmm.... Thanks for the link. That is indeed the kind of thing I was looking for. However, from looking at the code on that page, it looks like the AutoComplete box populates itself from URLs/files in given system directories. This is precisely what I don't want to do. I just want the box. I want to populate it myself with strings I pull out of a database and match from the rear (it's the first part that the user is going to need generated automatically).

Is there a way to do that, or would I be better off just using a combo box?