NSComboBox with alternative ways of writing

Question

I'm trying to implement a autocomplete function into a small app. I want to give the user the possibility to write down a city (from a long long list of cities) into a NSComboBox. That works fine, as long as the user is using the exact writing of the city inside my array of city names. But if they use, for whatever reason, a different spelling, it fails and the city is not found.

So if the user is looking for "Köln" for example, it's not a problem, but if he is looking for "Cologne" he wouldn't be able to find it.

For this I have, for each city an additional array of alternative spellings.

Now I would love NSComboBox (or any other type of TextField) to look not only in "city.name" but also within the array "city.alternativeNames". The shown value should as well represent what the user is writing.

I don't want to create an entry in the list of the pop-up part of NSComboBox for each alternative name, as that would make the list even longer than it is and would confuse people (cologne alone has 85 different spellings).

Thanks for your suggestions, I'm completely new to NSComboBox.

Answer 1

Interesting problem. I think probably you need to choose a different way to structure your data to make it easier.

Consider the lookup method (matching a string). Structuring your data for this case should account for the preferred spelling of each city (preferred by you, for the scrolled list).

How about a flat array of cities (to allow a simple search based on user spelling without also having to check each possible array of alternates and manage sorting them properly) but each has an optional (can be nil) "preferred spelling" pointer to the "correct" one. When displaying the options in the combo box, show the array filtered by those with no optional preferred spellings plus the currently-typed partial/full completion of the alternate spelling?

So a City has a name property and an optional preferred property. In your case, if Cologne is preferred, the Köln instance would have Cologne set as preferred. Köln would only appear in the list if the user typed it (even partially) and it would automatically be in the correct alpha-sorted position (assuming your cities are kept sorted).

Does this make sense or do I need to rephrase? Haven't had enough coffee this morning. :-)