App enabling the use of jQuery UI autocomplete widget for ModelChoiceFields with minimal configuration required.

1. Install or add django-simple-autocomplete to your Python path.
2. Add simple_autocomplete to your INSTALLED_APPS setting.
3. Add (r'^simple-autocomplete/', include('simple_autocomplete.urls')) to urlpatterns.
4. Ensure jQuery core, jQuery UI Javascript and jQuery UI CSS is loaded by your templates. Your jQueryUI bundle must include the autocomplete widget described at http://docs.jquery.com/UI/Autocomplete.

Django by default renders a select widget (a.k.a. combobox or dropdown) for foreign key fields. You can change the widget to an autocomplete widget by adding the model to the SIMPLE_AUTOCOMPLETE_MODELS tuple in your settings file. For instance, to use the autocomplete widget when selecting a user do:

SIMPLE_AUTOCOMPLETE_MODELS = ('auth.user',)

For more parameters set the SIMPLE_AUTOCOMPLETE dictionary in your settings file. The example above then becomes:

SIMPLE_AUTOCOMPLETE = {'auth.user': {'threshold':10}}

The dictionary format allows arbitrary parameters to be introduced in future. Parameter threshold indicates the minimum number of options required before the widget is rendered as an autocomplete widget. If the threshold is not met the default widget is rendered.

The product attempts to use a field title for filtering and display in the list. If the model has no field title then the first CharField is used. Eg. for the user model the field username is used.

The widget can be used implicitly in a form. The declaration of ModelChoiceField is all that is required:

class MyForm(forms.Form):
    user = forms.ModelChoiceField(queryset=User.objects.all(), initial=3)

The widget can be used explicitly in a form. In such a case you must provide an URL which returns results as JSON with format [(value, label), (value, label),...]. The initial and initial_display parameters are only required if there is a starting value:

from simple_autocomplete.widgets import AutoCompleteWidget

class MyForm(forms.Form):
    user = forms.ModelChoiceField(
        queryset=User.objects.all(),         
        initial=3,
        widget=AutoCompleteWidget(
            url='/custom-json-query', 
            initial_display='John Smith'
        )
    )

The ability to specify an URL for the widget enables you to hook up to other more advanced autocomplete query engines if you wish.