Remote autocomplete filtering
The autocomplete filtering capabilities aren't just limited to the default implementation, which searches for objects in array sources. We can specify a custom source() function that will retrieve only data the user is looking for. This is the ideal approach if you're looking to use autocomplete on a data source with thousands of items. Otherwise, filtering gets too demanding on the browser—the large data set to download, followed by a large array search with each keystroke.
How to do it...
We'll use the GitHub API as the data source for our autocomplete widget. This is a good example since it is much too large to use in the browser memory.
$( function() {
$( "#autocomplete" ).autocomplete({
minLength: 3,
source: function( request, response ) {
$.ajax({
url: "https://api.github.com/legacy/repos/search/:" + request.term,
dataType: "jsonp",
success: function( resp ) {
...
