Creating an instant search box for the CListView

We have our index page, with a CListView displaying a list of items, in this case contacts.

We want a single "instant" search box, that will filter the contacts list instantly.

Your index.php view page should look something like this:

<?php
$this->breadcrumbs=array(
'Contacts',
);

$this->menu=array(
array('label'=>'Create Contact', 'url'=>array('create')),
array('label'=>'Manage Contact', 'url'=>array('admin')),
);

//this adds a javascript event listener to the search box that will query the server with each keystroke. yw0 is the id of the clistview. q is the id of the text input box:
Yii::app()->clientScript->registerScript('search', "
  $('input#q').keyup(function(){
  $.fn.yiiListView.update('yw0', {
  data: $(this).serialize()
  });
  return false;
});
");
?>

<h1>Contacts</h1>

<!-- add a search box: -->
<input type="text" id="q" name="q" />

<?php $this->widget('zii.widgets.CListView', array(
'dataProvider'=>$dataProvider,
'itemView'=>'_view',
)); ?>

Change your actionIndex function in your ContactController to look something like this:

public function actionIndex() {
  $model = new Contact($scenario='search');
  $model->unsetAttributes();
  $model->first_name = $_GET['q'];

  //add the ->search() call: 
  $this->render('index',array('dataProvider'=>$model->search()))
}

Now when you type in the field, it should filter the contacts by their first name.

Improvements:

• change onkeyup so it fires with a few characters and after a small delay
• add a new search() function that will search several attributes at once using "OR" instead of "AND". This can be done in the compare() function with the 4th argument.
• Some heavy caching on the server so that the database is not overwhelmed.