Add autocompletion functionality to textareas

I cant see any benefit from this patch. The current implementation always sends the whole content of a textfield to the #autocomplete_path callback function AFAIK and gets a list of similar strings in response. This is good enough to enter/autocomplete a username or a path. Your patch adds the same functionality to textareas, but you still can't enter a list of users, right?

If you would extend the javascript to extract only the last word, send it back to the callback and replace it with the user's selection from
the resulting dropdown, it would be really helpful and we could even provide autocomplete from a dictionary or stg for textareas. With such
modification you could also enter a list of users into a textfield.

The current implementation of autocompletion in Drupal uses GET method and appends the search string to the url. By doing this we are limited to about 2000 characters (http://www.boutell.com/newfaq/misc/urllength.html). I dont think you will reach this limit with a textfield, but its easy with a textarea. You could argue that autocomplete should be used only to enter users/pathes/taxonomy term. But if we offer this feature for textareas in core, it implies to work in all common cases. One method to ensure this, is to add some basic logic to the client side (extract the last word in js) or use a different method (POST?).
You can still provide a simple autocomplete for textareas in your module by creating a custom form element type.

I'm all for autocomplete in textareas, but

1. its a feature request (not a task)
2. it must be considered carefully and
3. might need some changes to js and autocomplete callbacks

which all should be done with the next release. But thats only my opinion ;)

it's a feature.

Makes sense to me.

For consistency, need to add '#autocomplete_path' => FALSE to 'textarea' in system_elements().

features go in the development version.

closed dupe of this issue:
http://drupal.org/node/98500

sorry, was for a moment confused

sub

Please be sure to add menu access checking to the autocomplete path like in theme_textfield.

I tried this patch in D5 and it works quite fine.

But every time a user hits the enter-key (to get a new line in the textbox - so the autocomplete-box is empty) and then hits any other key (to write something) there is an error: "An HTTP error 404 occured."

Here's a patch against d8.

I didn't actually test this, but adding a couple of test couldn't hurt.

Ah, I forgot to add the #autocomplete property to the textarea

Lets see if the bot can apply git format-patch patches.

Re-rolled by the Boston Initiative. This applies cleanly as of commit 718fe5d90770f36335053d6f92fc53f73ac95951.

Would this be backported to D7?

@nagiek, most likely note, being that is a branch new feature request.

What about Drupal 7 Textarea Autocomplete! such field widget can be used for content tags, a textarea with autocomplete!

If you apply the patch in #20 by hand, it works without modification for 7.0 and 7.12. I'll write a patch eventually against D7.

I applied patch #20 on drupal 7.12 and I get Entity Reference field but still I don't see how to use Textarea autocomplete, I get only input autocomlete?
And I see no difference between Autocomplete widget and Autocomplete (tags style) because in result I get the same input single line autocomplete.

Also as autocomplete I get:
tag (1729), tag (1728)

May it be simple as usual: tag1, tag 2, tag 3

Probbaly this issue will need a re-roll after #675446: Use jQuery UI Autocomplete

A bit crazy idea. I think it should be done in Contrib. Welcome to re-open.