My wants shift with the wind.

[nonethefewer]

What I want today:

I have a table with companies in it.

I want an AJAXy sort of thing, that has a search box for each field I give a shit about.  I can enter, for example, "Shef" in the Name field and "Palm" in the City field, and get both Sheffield Company in Palm Springs, and also Sheffield Corporation in Palm Beach, listed.

I want then to be able to select one of the entries.  Though I can live with just searching enough until there's only one.  From the results, I need the company's ID, so that I can use it in a form on the page.

...and yet, I know cock-all about AJAX.

Halp?

Originally posted on Dreamwidth.  Number of comments so far:

Comments

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Could you start with something like DHTMLX (http://dhtmlx.com/docs/products/dhtmlxGrid/index.shtml)?

[hitchhiker.livejournal.com]

so basically, an ajax call is a request you can make to a server without refreshing the page when the data comes in. the two most common ways to use it are

1. have the server give you an html fragment back, which you then put into a div

2. have the server give you some data (typically in json format) back, which you then use as the input to javascript code to update the page in various ways

since making ajax calls directly from plain javascript is pretty tedious, i'd recommend using a library like jquery or prototype. here is one writeup (http://sixrevisions.com/javascript/the-power-of-jquery-with-ajax/) on using jquery to do things.