Ajax autocomplete driven profile search

Hey guys,

Since we are going with wonderful CB again, I thought you guys might already have a suggestion on how to implement this.

What my clients would like is a ajax profile search. There would be a drop-down to select the field to use as the search filter (first/last name, city, specialty - a custom created field). After you select the field of choice from the dropdown, and begin typing in the search field, it would show you an autocomplete dropdown exactly like google uses to help you finish your search.

The search page will also have 2 separate dropdowns for name and specialty for people to go through the list manually. This should be no biggie, I only mention it to illustrate the need for customization of the search template and any backend to make it work.

I was planning on doing all of this from scratch, as I'm expecting to have to hack cb's search page and com_comprofiler component to do this, but I would much appreciate if you guys have any suggestion on the approach you would use instead of starting from scratch and writing the component that would have to do database queries against the cb tables.

Thanks guys!

Will Poillion

Bump.

I found and bought this:
www.joomlapolis.com/cb-solutions/directory/search-a-indexing/ajax-search-users

Even though it's for 1.5 and not 1.6 I thought I could make the alterations myself and fix it for 1.6. Unfortunately, not only is it 2 years old and works only for 1.5, the code is obfuscated such that it can't be altered. I emailed the developer but not holding my breath on a refund or him delivering the source.

So, if anyone has any other option that's close to this that can be modified to do this, or any suggestions on other approaches, I'd be eternally grateful to hear them.

Otherwise, I'll have to start from scratch.

Thanks!
Will

Am not aware of any such solution at this time, sorry. Would likely be very doable using some jQuery to redesign the userlist within a new CB plugin however.