delaying actions between keypress in jQuery

ajax, delay, jquery

Solution

You can use jQuery's data abilities to do this, something like this:

$('#mySearch').keyup(function() {
  clearTimeout($.data(this, 'timer'));
  var wait = setTimeout(search, 500);
  $(this).data('timer', wait);
});

function search() {
  $.post("stuff.php", {nStr: "" + $('#mySearch').val() + ""}, function(data){
    if(data.length > 0) {
      $('#suggestions').show();
      $('#autoSuggestionsList').html(data);
    }else{
      $('#suggestions').hide();
    }
  });
}

The main advantage here is no global variables all over the place, and you could wrap this in an anonymous function in the setTimeout if you wanted, just trying to make the example as clean as possible.

Problem

Original source