Formatting the Autocomplete Suggestions

Let's style the autocomplete suggestions in this lesson to make them look more like Google's.

In this lesson, we’ll address any outstanding functionality that relies on JavaScript.

Outstanding Functionality

  • Using a template for the suggestion and auxiliary data.
    • We need to insert it between <li> elements, so it conforms to regular HTML inside a <ul>, which is where we’re inserting these suggestions.
  • Determine which sections need to be bolded
    • Using a comparison between the input value and the given suggestion
  • Add classes to elements as necessary for them to change their styles dynamically
    • The buttons look like they merge into the autosuggestions list, so I plan to apply a --autosuggest modifier class to the element when the autosuggestion results are shown.

Using a template

Wrapping API​ results into a template has gotten a lot easier since ES6 introduced template literals. The alternative before this was to just concatenate sections of the template with dynamic variables, either through + or have them in a list to join. For example, "<div>" + name + "</div">. With template literals, we just use ${variable} anywhere in our template string.

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