Add ability to group by category

[edwardhorsford]

For some types of autocomplete it would be useful to group by category.

Example:

Rough thoughts:

• Categories should (probably) not be searchable.
• might want to support entering foo:bar to search in category.

[NickColley]

I think perhaps @alex-ju has investigated this in some of his work?

[alex-ju]

In a slightly similar scenario we decided not to group them but to differentiate them using a hint below each result (showing the category it belongs to). We did that because we had too many categories that could've been potentially shown.

The result below is achieved using a custom template when rendering results - similar with the Design System search.

[edwardhorsford]

Would be great to either build this in, or if not, include it as an example snippet so others can see how to do it.

Lots of the requests I've seen previously are actually already supported - it's just that teams don't know they can do what they want.

[dilrajahdan]

+1 This would be a helpful feature.

Has anybody got this working yet?

[alex-ju]

@dilrajahdan if it's of any help, this is our config for the autocomplete used in contacts. While it's rather complex for a generic solution, you should be able to extract the needed bits.

[dilrajahdan]

Thanks @alex-ju! I'll check this out.

[elwynelwyn]

+1 on this, would be great to have separate sections / categories, or insert read only labels within the dropdown.

For me it would be ideally implemented via supporting <optgroup title="my category name"> in my progressively enhanced <select>