android - Custom AutoCompleteTextView behavior

Question

Out of the box, the AutoCompleteTextView widget does not seem to be able to match the input string in the middle of a list value - the matches are always made at the beginning; e.g., entering "ar" matches "argentina", but not "hungary".

How can I search for the text in the middle of the word ? Can anyone give me an idea ?

Thanks in advance !

Answer 1

You would need to write a custom Filter class and implement the performFiltering method yourself. This method takes a CharSequence argument, which you can use to perform whatever String operations you need in order to generate a list of matches from your dataset (in your case, you could use String.contains instead of String.startsWith). The performFiltering function is not run on the UI thread.

You then return your list of matches as a FilterResults object, which contains an Object values (your list of matches, probably an ArrayList) and an int count which is the size of your list of matches.

Finally, implement the publishResults callback method, which returns once the worker thread has generated the list of matches, allowing you to call notifyDataSetChanged on your AutoCompleteTextView's adapter so that it can display the results.