Pressing enter while auto-complete is searching causes strange behavior [#107611]

In certain situations, pressing enter while an auto-complete field is searching produces unexpected browser behavior. I've tested this in Firefox 2.0.0.1 and Safari 2.0.4 on Mac OS X.

Here are the steps to reproduce this problem.

Enter a few charecters into an auto-complete field. The the field will start searching for suggestions.
Quickly press enter before any suggestions appear.
Observe one of two behaviors (both pictured in the screenshot).

It's sometimes difficult to get the behavior, but I've found that occurs consistently when there is more than one potential auto-completion.

Comment	File	Size	Author
#1	autocomplete-enter.patch	768 bytes	Steven
	ac-ff-enter-bug.png	36.69 KB	Will White

Comments

Comment #1

Steven commented 9 January 2007 at 04:47

Priority:	Normal	» Critical
Status:	Active	» Needs review

Status	File	Size
new	autocomplete-enter.patch	768 bytes

The behaviour is actually perfectly normal :). Observe.

autocomplete.js contains the code:

      $(this.popup).empty().append(ul).show();

If you press enter while the results are being fetched, the popup is closed. this.popup is set to null. In jQuery $(null) is a shorthand for $(document), so we're asking for the document to be cleared and the results to be inserted in it. The other code path (for no results) hides the popup/document by settings its visibility to hidden. This might explain the white blank too.

Patch attached.