How To Handle Cases When No Item Selection Is Performed But A String Is Present In The Autocomplete Field?

I am using jQuery UI v1.9. I successfully implemented the jQuery UI Autocomplete widget but I have some trouble when I have to handle cases when a user doesn't select any item from

Solution 1:

You can set a callback function for the change event of autocomplete plugin where you should be able to check if an item has been selected:

$( "#autocomplete" ).autocomplete({
     change: function(e,ui){
         if(ui.item === null)
           alert('No item has been selected')  
    }
});

UPDATE:

If you want to trigger change event before input loses focus, you could use following code, triggering it on keypress event:

$( "#autocomplete" ).autocomplete({
         change: function(e,ui){
             if(!ui || ui.item === null)
                 console.log('No item has been selected') 
        }
    }).on('keypress',function(){$(this).autocomplete('option','change').call()});