You might have noticed that in various sites if you give your UserID first time, the next time you come to fill your UserID, the browser auto-suggestions it.

Of course you can clear your browser's form data (in IE) or form & search history (in Firefox) but wouldn't it be better if we turn this feature off ? This especially becomes a necessity when inputing sensitive data such as bank account number, Debit/Credit Card number etc on a shared computer. In such cases, another user at a later time visiting the same site would be presented with your data through autocomplete suggestions.

So how do we prevent browsers from suggesting it ?

The solution is to add autocomplete="off" attribute to textbox tag, which will help to stop auto suggestion behaviour for that particular textbox.

And if you want to stop that behaviour for all the textboxes that are present inside a form then add autocomplete="off" attribute to form tag.

According to HTML specifications, autocomplete is an unrecognized attribute which was originally created by Microsoft (feature of remembering what you have entered in previous text fields with the same name, available first in Internet Explorer) and has adopted by all other major modern browsers (except Opera).

[link:www.mindfiresolutions.com]

The only time I've done something similar was in C++ and I used a Patricia Tree. It worked fairly well. However, since in my application I didn't need to look up every possible prefix, just selected prefixes, I've since started using a hash map of the selected prefixes. (The performance is slightly better in my application, but mainly, the code maintenance is lower since I use the built-in .NET generic.)

I'm relatively new to F# (a few months) and I think that writing a Patricia Tree in F# would be a challenge but not at all unthinkable.

I'm just getting ready to start mingling F# and C# data structures for a proof-of-concept I'm doing, so I'm just about to learn whether that's painful or not, lol. (But I really suspect not.)

-Neil

The solution is to add autocomplete="off" attribute to textbox tag, which will help to stop auto suggestion behaviour for that particular textbox.

And if you want to stop that behaviour for all the textboxes that are present inside a form then add autocomplete="off" attribute to form tag.

According to HTML specifications, autocomplete is an unrecognized attribute which was originally created by Microsoft (feature of remembering what you have entered in previous text fields with the same name, available first in Internet Explorer) and has adopted by all other major modern browsers (except Opera).

[link:www.mindfiresolutions.com]

Hi Matt,

Interesting questions.

1. Is doing this in F# a good idea?

My gut reaction says no, put the data in a relational database slap some indexes on the apporiate columns and let the db take the strain. However if you really think a hand code solution would be better F# is generally good at tree mainipulations and that sort of thing.

2. Is doing this in F# a good idea?

Wouldn't have thought so. I suppose you may see a few more allocations and therefore objects that require collecting if you stick to a very pure functional apporach and use lots of immutable data structures, but the GC in .NET is self tuning and you should see that it handles this quite efficently. The preformance counters in .NET are very good so you can easily profile your app and using perfmon to see if there is too much time spent in GC and adjust the app accordingly. But I wouldn't think you'd need to.

3. Is using an F# data structure from C# painful?

It can be but doesn't have to be. The answer in a nut shell is, union types and tuples look a bit strange form C# records and basic types like strings look fine. I cover this in detail "Foundations of F#".

4. Anyone got an implementation they'd like to share?

No sorry.

Cheers,
Rob