FAST autocomplete is broken

[jrochkind]

Maybe broke as part of our vite migration?

When I type in the should-be-autocompleted subject field on production, I get this JS error in dev console:

5qa_autocomplete.js:56 Uncaught TypeError: o.autocomplete is not a function
    at Vi (qa_autocomplete.js:56:14)
    at HTMLInputElement.<anonymous> (qa_autocomplete.js:124:7)
    at HTMLBodyElement.dispatch (jquery.js:5430:27)
    at N.handle (jquery.js:5234:28)
    at Object.trigger (jquery.js:8745:12)
    at Object.simulate (jquery.js:8814:16)
    at HTMLDocument.n (jquery.js:8848:17)

[jrochkind]

Hm, the file that implements autocomplete does a:

import 'devbridge-autocomplete';

Under webpacker, that was enough to make a jquery .autocomplete() function available. Under vite it appears not to be, not sure why or how to fix, looking into it.

[jrochkind]

filed devbridge/jQuery-Autocomplete#843

[jrochkind]

Hm. We could copy and paste that jquery plugin to a local file, and edit it's loading code to work.

We could switch to a whole different autocomplete implementation (that one isn't very actively maintained, and requires jquery; although it works well). Blacklight just switched to: https://github.com/github/auto-complete-element

It would require some changes to switch to that one -- uses web components, so markup changes. Server is expected to return actual HTML, not json. But it would probably work in the end?

[jrochkind]

Huh, while it also hasn't been maintained in forever, there may be a non-jQuery autocomplete alternative from the same source that may import properly and require few code changes....

https://github.com/devbridge/Vanilla-Autocomplete

Very limited docs though. Also seems to maybe not be released to npm, annoying.

[jrochkind]

Another one we could maybe switch to in future: https://github.com/digitalfortress-tech/typeahead-standalone