My experiments with the ASP.NET AJAX AutoComplete Extender

"..the Colonel, seeing his mistake, turned to fluent and picturesque Urdu and Kim was contented. No man could be a fool who knew the language so intimately..." Kim (Rudyard Kipling)

Bollywood movies owe their popularity to the mandatory song & dance routine. Many of the popular Bollywood songs are in Hindustani/Urdu & understanding them requires a good grasp of the language. This was not however the reason I was overjoyed when I found a Urdu to English mini dictionary IN ENGLISH compiled by a Urdu enthusiast at NASA & converted it into a Windows app for easy personal reference in my VB6 days. Although I'm not a native speaker, I just fell for the language's charm.

I have been following the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit developments with interest and I like the convenience they offer in enhancing the UI & web applications without complicated code. With the code examples online, learning about the AutoComplete Extender was easy & I decided to put it to practice by hooking it to the Dictionary database. The mini dictionary is in plain text format & it wasn't difficult to port it into SQL Server format with DTS (Data Transformation Services). I have put up the source code for a minimalistic web based interface to the Dictionary with auto complete functionality online & welcome feedback on it.

The AutoComplete Extender expects its "auto suggest" list through a web service. It has over 10 properties including client side caching & a CompletionSetCount property that decides the number of suggestions to be retrieved from the web service. The actual working of the CompletionSetCount property was not immediately obvious & after I gathered some info on it, I specified a "TOP clause" that uses the "count" parameter of the ServiceMethod in my "SELECT query" to fetch just as many matches.

The blogs of ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit Team members Shawn, David & Kirti contain useful notes on the Toolkit.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Datawrapper Makes Data Beautiful & Insightful

Datawrapper is an online data visualization tool available at datawrapper.de that lets you create charts, maps and tables. Here's the list of the different visualizations you can create - Bar Chart Stacked Bars Grouped Bars Split Bars Bullet Bars Column Chart Stacked Columns Grouped Columns Lines Multiple Lines Area Chart Scatter Plot Dot Plot Range Plot Arrow Plot Election Donut Pie Chart Multiple Pies Donut Chart Multiple Donuts Choropleth map Symbol map Locator map Table It is self-funded by its customers’ subscription revenue. It also provides a good Free Plan .  The Datawrapper “Created with Datawrapper” attribution appears at the bottom of the chart if you use the free plan. However, you retain full copyright to your charts, maps, and tables. To remove the attribution, you’ll need to update to Custom or Enterprise plan. The Datawrapper River is a place to exchange charts and maps with other Datawrapper users. After adding a chart to the River, anyone can use it and customiz...
Read more

Maven Crash Course - Learn Power Query, Power Pivot & DAX in 15 Minutes

Image
In the Maven Crash Course " Learn Power Query, Power Pivot & DAX in 15 Minutes ", Chris Dutton walks through a hypothetical business case while showcasing the power of modern Excel tools like Power Query, Power Pivot and DAX. Power Query is used to extract, transform, and load data from external sources like SQL databases, PDF and CSV files. A relational model is created to join the tables without writing a single formula. Exploratory analysis is done using Power Pivot and Data Analysis Expressions (DAX). Data Analysis Expressions is the language that we can use to define new calculated columns and measures to enhance our Data Model instead of the traditional cell formulas that we'd typically use if our data was stored in worksheets. Pivot Charts and slicers are used to design a simple interactive report that the sales managers can use to analyze revenue trends and product performance.
Read more

GitHub Copilot Q&A - 1

Image
Key takeaways from the talk in Q&A format - What is GitHub Copilot and how does it work? GitHub Copilot is a suite of tools designed for code completion. It works by analysing the code and comments you type in your IDE and sending that context to GitHub. Copilot then uses OpenAI's language model (in December 2024, it is GPT 4o by default and you can also choose the preview versions of o1-mini & o1-preview if you like) to understand your intent and generate suggestions for code completion. You can then accept, reject, or modify these suggestions. What context does GitHub Copilot consider when making suggestions? Copilot considers the entirety of the file you are currently working on, not just the code from your cursor position upwards. It also analyses the content of other open tabs in your IDE, starting with those closest to the current tab. This helps Copilot focus on the most relevant information. Is it necessary to meticulously manage open tabs for Copilot to work effect...
Read more