I just found out that the jQueryUI now has it\'s own built-in auto-complete combo box. Great news!
Unfortunately, the next thing I found is that making it multi-colu
The post you reference is using a callback for the source instead of a url. The important part of it is the success callback on the ajax function. It takes response from the server and maps it to an object that the autocomplete expects to recieve:{label: '', value: ''}. In that example they are setting the label (which shows in the menu) to the html they want displayed.
If you look at the autocomplete source the actual rendering of each item is handled by _renderItem, each label is wrapped by an and then appended to an element.
If what you want to do cannot be handled by setting the item label to whatever html you want to display, you could try and monkeypatch as described here.
Post some of your code and I might be able to help with a more concrete example.