Bootstrap Combobox

We had need of a combobox at work and after looking around at the available options I was not happy with any of them. The project had all it's styling based on Twitter's Bootstrap, so building on that made sense.

How to install it

You can install this plugin one of two ways.

1. Manual download

Previously, this was the only way to install the plugin. You will need two files included in your HTML in order for this to work:

js/bootstrap-combobox.js
css/bootstrap-combobox.css

2. Bower install

This plugin is now in bower! If you've already installed bower on your machine, simply use the command:

bower install bootstrap-combobox

This will install the plugin to your bower_components folder. For more information please see http://bower.io/

How to use it

The dependencies are the Bootstrap stylesheet(CSS or LESS). Include it and then the stylesheet(CSS or LESS) and javascript.

Then just activate the plugin on a normal select box(suggest having a blank option first):

<select class="combobox">
  <option></option>
  <option value="PA">Pennsylvania</option>
  <option value="CT">Connecticut</option>
  <option value="NY">New York</option>
  <option value="MD">Maryland</option>
  <option value="VA">Virginia</option>
</select>

<script type="text/javascript">
  $(document).ready(function(){
    $('.combobox').combobox();
  });
</script>

Options

When activating the plugin, you may include an object containing options for the combobox

$('.combobox').combobox({bsVersion: '2'});

menu: Custom markup for the dropdown menu list element.

item: Custom markup for the dropdown menu list items.

matcher: Custom function with one item argument that compares the item to the input. Defaults to matching on the query being a substring of the item, case insenstive

sorter: Custom function that sorts a list items for display in the dropdown

highlighter: Custom function for highlighting an item. Defaults to bolding the query within a matched item

template: Custom function that returns markup for the combobox.

bsVersion: Version of bootstrap being used. This is used by the default template function to generate markup correctly. Defaults to '3'. Set to '2' for compatibility with Bootstrap 2

appendId: The desired id of the transformed combobox. This will become the id attr and can be mapped to a label using the for attribute. Useful for accessibility.