Can selenium handle autocomplete?

Question

I have a test case that requires typing in a partial value into an ajax based textfield and verifying the list has the expected content. If it does, select the content. An

Answer 1

Your question is slightly ambigious.

Most browsers keep a value cache that is based on the name of the field: This is the value that is being suggested as autocompletion by your browser even though you may never have visited the site before. This feature is non-standard across all browsers, and there's going to be no standard way for selenium to detect/analyze this. You can still do it, but you'll have to make javascript functions that determine the values yourself. Then you can use "eval" in selenium to execute these functions. I have not seen any js libraries that can tell you these values in a cross-browser compatible way.

The other alternative is that you use ajax to do a server-side submit of the partially entered value. In this case it's just a matter of typing the values into the textbox and asserting that the expected values turn up. Normally the autocomplete suggestions show up in some layer on the client side.