Richard Willis-Owen

A JavaScript autocomplete element that links through to your database isn’t built into CakePHP any more – here is a simple solution to add to your application using a jQuery plugin.
Why a plugin? jQuery doesn’t include this functionality, it is provided by jQuery UI but including that library may be a heavyweight solution for your application.

It should end up looking like the image below – as you type, relevant options from your database will appear in the list beneath.

You can download the jQuery autocomplete plugin from https://github.com/dyve/jquery-autocomplete
Extract the files from the archive and move the .css and .js files from the src folder into the css and js folders of the CakePHP webroot directory.

Link to the CSS and JavaScript in your default layout:

echo $this->Html->css('jquery.autocomplete');
echo $this->Html->script('jquery.autocomplete.min.js');

Add a small form to your View, in this example there is a model called company and we want to use autocomplete on the name field.

Form->create('Company', array('type' => 'post', 'action' => 'find'));
echo $this->Form->input('name');
echo $this->Form->submit();
echo $this->Form->end();
?>

Add this script block to the bottom of the document which activates the plugin and tells it where to submit AJAX requests to:

Modify jQuery.autocomplete.css to look nice with CakePHP default CSS:

.acResults ul li {
	margin: 0px;
	padding: 2px 5px;
	cursor: pointer;
	display: block;
	font: menu;
	overflow: hidden;
	color: #333;
}

Now back to some CakePHP – Your Controller needs a new action which the AJAX requests will be sending data to:

public function find() {
  $this->Company->recursive = -1;
  if ($this->request->is('ajax')) {
    $this->autoRender = false;
    $results = $this->Company->find('all', array(
      'fields' => array('Company.name'),
      //remove the leading '%' if you want to restrict the matches more
      'conditions' => array('Company.name LIKE ' => '%' . $this->request->query['q'] . '%')
    ));
    foreach($results as $result) {
      echo $result['Company']['name'] . "\n";
    }
    
  } else {
  	//if the form wasn't submitted with JavaScript
    //set a session variable with the search term in and redirect to index page
    $this->Session->write('companyName',$this->request->data['Company']['name']);
    $this->redirect(array('action' => 'index'));
  }
}

And finally add some code to the index action in the index action, which handles what happens if the form was submitted via a button press rather than AJAX.

//if there's a session with some data in, add a filter to the search conditions
if ($this->Session->check('companyName')) {
  $name = $this->Session->read('companyName');
  if ($name) {
    $this->paginate['conditions'][] = array('Company.name LIKE' => '%' . $name . '%');
    $this->request->data['Company']['name'] = $name;
  }
}

That’s it.

To to make submit buttons appear alongside form elements
here is a simple bit of jQuery to improve the appearance

$(document).ready(function(){
  $('div.input, div.submit').css({
    'float' : 'left',
    width : '200px',
    clear : 'none'
  });
  $('div.submit').css('margin-top', '14px');
  $('div.input.text').css('margin-top', '-4px');
});

Thanks to the answer on this question from StackOverflow for some inspiration
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6071828/autocomplete-search-form-cakephp

This uses CakePHP 2.2.4

The CakePHP FormHelper datetime element is functional but also fairly tedious to use, here is a picture of how it looks.

With a small amount of effort you can change your view to use date and time pickers that present a much richer experience to your users.

Rich Date Picker:

Rich Time Picker:

In this example I’m using a model called ‘tasks‘ that contains a field named ‘due‘ of type datetime.
The model, controller and view are all using the default code generated by the ‘bake’ console command.

Third party components – I’ve found two easy to use libraries:

1. Zebra_Datepicker 1.6.2
http://stefangabos.ro/jquery/zebra-datepicker/

2. jQuery timePicker 0.2
https://github.com/perifer/timePicker

Download both of these and extract the files.
Locate the JavaScript files from the downloads and put the following into your CakePHP app/webroot/js:
jquery.timePicker.min.js
zebra_datepicker.js

Locate the CSS files and put the following into CakePHP app/webroot/css:
timePicker.css
zebra_datepicker.css
calendar.png

If you want to move calendar.png into an images folder then make sure you update the URL links in the zebra_datepicker.css file

Link to these in your default layout app/View/Layouts/default.ctp:

//CSS
echo $this->Html->css('zebra_datepicker');
echo $this->Html->css('timePicker');

//JavaScript
echo $this->Html->script('jquery.timePicker.min');
echo $this->Html->script('zebra_datepicker');

Note that you must already have a jQuery script linked to your template, if not the following above the previous 2 lines:

echo $this->Html->script('http://code.jquery.com/jquery.min.js');

In the view file, convert the existing datetime input to text:

echo $this->Form->input('due', array('type' => 'text'));

Now for the JavaScript. I don’t want to disturb what CakePHP is trying to do so firstly I hide the TaskDue element, then add separate text inputs for date and time. Then I activate widgets for each of these elements. Finally I add a submit event to put the values in those widgets back into the CakePHP input element in the format it is expecting.

Here is the code which should be added to the bottom of the document:

You may need to change the timePicker CSS a little to work with the default CakePHP CSS:

div.time-picker {
  position: absolute;
  height: 191px;
  width:200px;
  overflow: auto;
  background: #fff;
  border: 1px solid #aaa;
  z-index: 99;
  margin: 0;
}
div.time-picker-12hours {
  width:200px;
}
div.time-picker ul {
  list-style-type: none;
  margin: 0;
  padding: 0;
}
div.time-picker li {
  cursor: pointer;
  height: 12px;
  padding: 4px 3px;
  color: #000;
}
div.time-picker li.selected {
  background: #0063CE;
  color: #fff;
}