Search as You Type with Autosuggest
User Story
A user of an application on a mobile device wants to be able to perform a text-based search by selecting from suggestions offered by the application on the basis of his/her partial text entries. The suggestions are refined as the user continues to type and select from them until the user stops typing and submits a query.
Request
The request based on the above user story needs to be made against the endpoint named autosuggest – it is a request for suggestions. The user text entries are submitted as values of the parameter q.
Here is an example of a request based on the text "mc" typed in by the user, standing in Bryant Park in New York:
https://places.ls.hereapi.com/places/v1/autosuggest
?apiKey={YOUR_API_KEY}
&at=40.7539,-73.9837
&q=mc
&prettyIf required, the application developer can refine this request through the parameter result_types to restrict the autosuggest response to specific types of suggestions. The possible values are address, place, category, chain or query.
Here is a version of the same request, using result_types to confine the suggestions to address and query:
https://places.ls.hereapi.com/places/v1/autosuggest
?apiKey={YOUR_API_KEY}
&at=40.7539,-73.9837
&q=mc
&result_types=address,query
&prettyResponse
The body of the response to the query that chooses only address and query suggestions contains the element "results" shown below – subject to modifications (see Examples) . The result items highlight the user's text entries and indicate completions. The application developer can use the href attributes to trigger a further autosuggest request on any of the completions selected by the user.
{
"results":[
{
"title":"mcdonald",
"highlightedTitle":"<b>mc</b>donald",
"completion":"donald",
"href": "http://...",
"type":"urn:nlp-types:autosuggest",
"resultType":"query"
},
{
"title":"mccarthy",
"highlightedTitle":"<b>mc</b>carthy",
"completion":"carthy",
"href": "http://...",
"type":"urn:nlp-types:autosuggest",
"resultType":"query"
},
{
"title":"mcguinness",
"highlightedTitle":"<b>mc</b>guinness",
"completion":"guinness",
"href": "http://...",
"type":"urn:nlp-types:autosuggest",
"resultType":"query"
},
...
]
}