What are the “response” and “request” arguments in jQuery UI Autocomplete's “source” callback?

Question

I\'m looking at the autocomplete tutorial, and I have a few questions: http://jqueryui.com/demos/autocomplete/#option-disabled

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Answer 1

request and response are simply the names that the author of the code has chosen to give to the two formal parameters of the callback assigned to the source option of the autocomplete widget:

Autocomplete can be customized to work with various data sources, by just specifying the source option. A data source can be:

• an Array with local data
• a String, specifying a URL
• a Callback

The third variation, the callback, provides the most flexibility, and can be used to connect any data source to Autocomplete. The callback gets two arguments:

• A request object, with a single property called "term", which refers to the value currently in the text input. For example, when the user entered "new yo" in a city field, the Autocomplete term will equal "new yo".
• A response callback, which expects a single argument to contain the data to suggest to the user. This data should be filtered based on the provided term, and can be in any of the formats described above for simple local data (String-Array or Object-Array with label/value/both properties). It's important when providing a custom source callback to handle errors during the request. You must always call the response callback even if you encounter an error. This ensures that the widget always has the correct state.