Why Autocomplete Widget allows to enter custom options?

Hello,

I have found this widget useless. Anyone can enter whatever text they want, without any limits being imposed to choose from "drop down" autocomplete choices.

There needs to be an option that is currently direly missing: Enforce selecting choices among the dropdown/autocomplete's available options ONLY.

This is a really neat widget for replacing the disgusting old school dropdown when you have more than a handful of options to pick from, but it just won't do the job when people can enter any other option they wish too. defeats its own purpose with a flawed and shortcoming design so far.

Would you please consider fixing this as described above by providing us with an enforcement switch that causes an error if the entered value is not among the autocmplete/dropdown choices?

Thanks

Omid

As far as I understood, you refer to Autocomplete widget. It indeed allows to enter any value, because is built to show options as "hints" for respondents and IS originally a Text input. 

I can suggest to use Dynamic Dropdowns widget for the purposes you shared:

https://widgets.jotform.com/widget/dynamic_dropdowns

It is a Dropdown with a search option, so won't allow to insert any custom value.

Hope this helps! But, if you need any other assistance as to your JotForms, just let us know.

AH! Then I must have misunderstood exactly the difference between these widgets! It would be nice if a tiny tiny pop up blurb can in one sentence or two explain what each widget does when I mouse over on jotform on the lefthand side as I build my form, maybe even with a gif linked that can pop up additionally, as when I typed in "dropdown" there were so many of them and I just went with what I had in mind as secondary function of "write-in" or "autocomplete", wasted an entire half a day with this thing and then only found out in the end anyone can enter anything into it.

"autocomplete dropdown" is a very misleading name in such a case, because by nature, a dropdown field has to be limited to dropdown choices.

I am not here to argue, I took your point and going to check out dynamic dropdowns, but this whole thing can be made a bit more user friendly instead of just throwing us onto the fire of a 100 dropdown widgets to figure it out with wasting time.

I hope your product design and marketing leaders take note of this ticket to improve on this topic.

Thanks

Omid

We appreciate your feedback. And I really understand and agree to your point. 

I will submit a feature request on this issue, so we could have a description for widgets just at the widgets tab in future. 

Unfortunately, I can't provide the ETA as to when this is going to be implemented, but please be sure that we will update you via this thread. 

Meanwhile, we will gladly assist if there is anything else we could help you with.

Thank you for your cooperation!