submit form with delay while entering data into input field

Question

I have a simple form that I need to submit automatically when text is entered.

I can use the onChange or onKeyUp without the best result.

HTML is:

Answer 1

This is a bad idea. You don't want to circumvent the controls people expect on form inputs. If you don't want a submit button then at least wait to submit until you capture an "enter".

Other than a user mind reading device how could you ever know when a user is done typing, unless you were looking for them to type "return" or "enter"? Users won't know they're supposed to pause a moment to let the form submit at the timeout, or that they need to hurry up to get their search entered before the timeout of 500MS.

See: this question

Of if you want to start returning results immediately upon any submission you could do some kind of ajax autocomplete.

autocomplete http://img9.imageshack.us/img9/5526/autocompletegoogle.png

Here's a jQuery example of submitting on an enter:

  $("input").keypress(function(e) {
            switch (e.keyCode) {
                    case 13:
                            $("#formid").submit();
                            return false;
                    default:
                            return true;
            }
    });