Juri Strumpflohner Follow Juri is a full stack developer and tech lead with a special passion for the web and frontend development. He creates online videos for Egghead.io, writes articles on his blog and for tech magazines, speaks at conferences and holds training workshops. Juri is also a recognized Google Developer Expert in Web Technologies

IE problems with AjaxControl Toolkit's AutoComplete extender

Jun 18, 2008 1 min read

Microsoft's .Net AjaxControlToolkit provides a nice extender for doing Ajax-enabled auto-completion by calling a webservice on the server-side.
Below is a sample:

<cc1:AutoCompleteExtender2 ID="aceBirthPlace" runat="server" SecondControlElementID="txbBirthPlaceCode"
TargetControlID="txbBirthPlace" ServicePath="~/FormsControls/AutoCompleteLists.asmx"
ServiceMethod="GetAllMunicipality" MinimumPrefixLength="3" CompletionInterval="100"
EnableCaching="true" CompletionSetCount="20" FirstRowSelected="true">
</cc1:AutoCompleteExtender2>

Today however I recognized a problem with the CompletionInterval property.

CompletionInterval: Time in milliseconds when the timer will kick in to get suggestions using the web service.

Since we got some complaints that the appearance of the autocomplete box takes to long, we set the CompletionInterval to "0" (zero). In that way, once the MinimumPrefixLength is reached the javascript starts to call the webservice. Everything worked fine with Firefox but - as usual - on IE no autocomplete entry was shown at all. Changing the value to "100" made everything work again. I don't know the exact reason (don't have the time to check it out).

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