jQueryUI Autocomplete-Widget: I want to bind a function to the select event of the menu widget - jquery-ui

Question

I have the following script using the jQueryUI autocomplete widget. It calls some function whenever a menu item in the selection box is being selected:
<script type="text/javascript">
$(function() {
$( "#tags" ).autocomplete({
source: [ "ActionScript", "AppleScript", "Asp"],
select: function() {
console.log("Element has been selected");
}
});
});
</script>
<div class="ui-widget">
<label for="tags">Tags: </label>
<input id="tags">
</div>
This works nicely. But I need this method in a multiple of instances of the autocomplete widget, so I prefer extending the autocomplete widget using the widget factory.
This works nicely whenever I want to override methods of the autocomplete plugin:
$.widget("ui.myAutocomplete", $.extend({}, $.ui.autocomplete.prototype, {
search: function( value, event ) {
// this WORKS!
console.log('overriding autocomplete.search')
return $.ui.autocomplete.prototype.search.apply(this, arguments);
}
}));
However, I have no clue how to do that for the underlying menu widget.
I tried to override the _init method and binding a function to the select event. However this does not work as I don't know how to access the bind method of the menu-widget (or this menu widget is not yet there at this point during runtime)
$.widget("ui.myAutocomplete", $.extend({}, $.ui.autocomplete.prototype, {
_init: function() {
// this does NOT work.
this.bind('select', function() { console.log('item has been selected') })
return $.ui.autocomplete.prototype._init.apply(this, arguments);
}
}));

Answer 1

I think you're close; you should be overriding _create instead of _init:
$.widget("ui.myAutocomplete", $.extend({}, $.ui.autocomplete.prototype, {
_create: function() {
// call autocomplete's default create method:
$.ui.autocomplete.prototype._create.apply(this, arguments);
// this.element is the element the widget was invoked with
this.element.bind("autocompleteselect", this._select);
},
_select: function(event, ui) {
// Code to be executed upon every select.
}
}));
Usage:
$("input").myAutocomplete({
/* snip */
});
Here's a working example: http://jsfiddle.net/EWsS4/