James, >because I am searching through towns and postcode (zip codes) for Australia >some post codes are as short as 2/3 char so I need to keep it set to 3 but >just return a maxium of 10 results. When you enter the postcode (zipcode) >you would get no more than about 4 results. > >So because of the large data set do people think I should go with SQL or >XML ? sorry I was not quite sure
You really need AJAX. You'll end up generating a lot less data to the client. As it stands right now, you're passing the entire dataset to the browser when the user loads the page. By using the AJAX operation, you're only going to load a subset of the data--the subset that matches the user's typed input. This will drastically reduce the data you send to the user's browser. The Autocomplete plug-in uses a really thin return format--which is just a pipe delimited string, with each new line being a new record. You an example output here: http://jquery.bassistance.de/autocomplete/search.php?q=sp This is definitely you're best route and really the original goal of the plug-in. -Dan
