accessible-autocomplete
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alphagov
On manually deleting the selected option the initial value is still submitted.
Hi Team
When a user has selected an option from the autocomplete, if they press the delete key until the input field is blank and then submit the form, the initial value is submitted, as opposed to a blank field.
Yeah, this is a legit issue with the way the autocomplete works currently. Because it uses a select element underneath, unless that select element has a default option which doesn't pass validation, the user will always submit whatever is default for that select. You need to add custom validation to prevent this.
I've marked this as a bug as we should find a better way to communicate or work around this behaviour. This is a possible solution: https://github.com/alphagov/accessible-autocomplete/issues/198
Also worth noting that this also applies when entering gibberish into the field, basically anything that doesn't match an option results in the previously selected option being submitted.
My expectation is that whatever's entered in the field be submitted.
Where it's progressively enhanced from a select, this should be blank or an option - as we shouldn't allow users to leave text in the field that isn't an option.
Where it's an enhanced text box, we should leave whatever they type and submit it.
This is a legitimate bug that needs fixing but it's also related to the wider discussion here: https://github.com/alphagov/accessible-autocomplete/issues/260
After looking into this today I can see several scenarios for null values (including that in which a user deletes the previous selection in order to submit null), some of which are covered by existing documentation.
On considering proposed fixes it became clear that a solution will result in the implementation diverging between javascript-enabled and javascript-disabled implementations of the library.
The proposed solution I looked into was programmatically adding a null option when the field is non-mandatory. However, for this to match the javascript-disabled scenario, it requires a developer update to the html of the page to include a null option, resulting in a breaking change.
I've submitted a pull request to the README to warn developers that clearing the field does not clear the submitted value and to use showAllValues if they need a null option.
I wonder if it would be hard to make the autocomplete swap out the select for an input when it initialises - ie don't use selects under the hood after initialisation - that way whatever the input visually contains is what gets submitted.