I was playing around with some code recently, and came across a very easy way to create a city lookup field using jQuery’s UI components and a very useful webservice provided by Geonames.
How the autocomplete functionality in jQuery works, is by wrapping the functionality around a standard html text input field, populating a dropdown list of values from an ajax call to a webservice, in this case, the Geonames webservice.
When supplied with a partial city name, the GeoNames webservice returns back a list of information for cities matching the partial city name supplied, allowing you to display, and keep track of, the country, province, full city name, and a host of other info. Full documentation is provided on the GeoNames site.
$( "#city" ).autocomplete({ source: function( request, response ) { $.ajax({ url: "http://ws.geonames.org/searchJSON", dataType: "jsonp", data: { featureClass: "P", style: "full", maxRows: 12, name_startsWith: request.term }, success: function( data ) { //Display city name, state name, country name response( $.map( data.geonames, function( item ) { return { label: item.name + (item.adminName1 ? ", " + item.adminName1 : "") + ", " + item.countryName, value: item.name + (item.adminName1 ? ", " + item.adminName1 : "") + ", " + item.countryName } })); } }); }, minLength: 2, select: function( event, ui ) { $('#city').val(ui.item.value); return false; } });
Comments