Built-in auto-suggestion editor

2 min

The following example shows how to create a rich-text editor that provides editor selection suggestions from a drop-down list. The code example creates a class that implements the interface ISelectionQuery:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using EPiServer.ServiceLocation;
using EPiServer.Shell.ObjectEditing;

namespace EPiServer.Samples {
  [ServiceConfiguration(typeof (ISelectionQuery))]
  public class MySelectionQuery: ISelectionQuery {
    SelectItem[] _items;
    public MySelectionQuery() {
      _items = new SelectItem[] {
        new SelectItem() {
            Text = String.Empty, Value = String.Empty
          },
          new SelectItem() {
            Text = "Alternative1", Value = "1"
          },
          new SelectItem() {
            Text = "Alternative 2", Value = "2"
          }
      };
    }
    //Will be called when the editor types something in the selection editor.
    public IEnumerable<ISelectItem> GetItems(string query) {
      return _items.Where(i => i.Text.StartsWith(query, StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase));
    }
    //Will be called when initializing an editor with an existing value to get the corresponding text representation.
    public ISelectItem GetItemByValue(string value) {
      return _items.FirstOrDefault(i => i.Value.Equals(value));
    }
  }
}

Add the AutoSuggestionEditor attribute to your property to use the editor:

[AutoSuggestSelection(typeof (MySelectionQuery))]
public virtual string SelectionEditor1 {
  get;
  set;
}

[AutoSuggestSelection(typeof (MySelectionQuery), AllowCustomValues = true)]
public virtual string SelectionEditor2 {
  get;
  set;
}

Note Set the AllowCustomValues property to true so that the editor is not forced to select one of the suggested choices. By default, this property is set to false and the editor must select one of the suggested values.