AutoComplete for Xamarin.Android: Getting Started
In this article you will learn how to initialize RadAutoCompleteTextView and use it with its basic configuration.
Initialization
In order to use RadAutoCompleteTextView you need to add references to the Input, Common, List and Primitives libraries which are part of Telerik UI for Xamarin.Android suite.
After your project is set up and ready to use TelerikUI, you need to create an instance of RadAutoCompleteTextView. The common way to do this is to create an RauAutoCompleteTextView in the XML layout of your activity.
<com.telerik.widget.autocomplete.RadAutoCompleteTextView
android:layout_width="match_parent"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:layout_marginBottom="20dp"
android:id="@+id/autocmp">
</com.telerik.widget.autocomplete.RadAutoCompleteTextView>
Then you should access the autocomplete object in your activity/fragment and populate it with data.
this.autocomplete = (RadAutoCompleteTextView)rootView.FindViewById(Resource.Id.autocmp);
Populate with data
In order to populate the autocomplete you need to create an AutoCompleteAdapter object and pass it the array of suggestions which should be TokenModel objects. The TokenModel is a unified object used by the autocomplete to represent data objects as suggestions or tokens.
We will use the following list of string for the purposes of the examples.
this.data = new List<string>() { "Australia", "Albania","Austria", "Argentina", "Maldives",
"Bulgaria","Belgium","Cyprus","Italy","Japan",
"Denmark","Finland","France","Germany","Greece","Hungary","Ireland",
"Latvia","Luxembourg","Macedonia","Moldova","Monaco","Netherlands","Norway",
"Poland","Romania","Russia","Sweden","Slovenia","Slovakia","Turkey","Ukraine",
"Vatican City", "Chad", "China", "Chile" };
Then we will create TokenModel object out of the original data array.
private List<TokenModel> GetTokenObjects()
{
List<TokenModel> feedData = new List<TokenModel>();
for (int i = 0; i < this.data.Count; i++)
{
TokenModel token = new TokenModel(this.data[i], null);
feedData.Add(token);
}
return feedData;
}
Finally, we will create a AutoCompleteAdapter with the list of TokenModel objects.
this.adapter = new AutoCompleteAdapter(this.Context, this.GetTokenObjects(), Java.Lang.Integer.ValueOf(Resource.Layout.suggestion_item_layout));
this.adapter.CompletionMode = CompletionMode.StartsWith;
this.autocomplete.Adapter = this.adapter;
Autocomplete is now ready to be used. You can additionally set up its suggest and display modes according to your needs.
this.autocomplete.SuggestMode = SuggestMode.Suggest;
this.autocomplete.DisplayMode = DisplayMode.Plain;
