In Rails there are wonderful pre-built form components covering text fields, text areas, checkboxes and much more.

Also included are AJAX components like text_field_with_autocomplete, which is quite useful.

As I posted recently, the UI for selecting items typically relies on the SELECT tag. When the lists grow to an excessive length, it is an unfriendly user experience.

My first attempt involved the following UI.

The auto complete field allows the user to quickly search and set the selection of SELECT tag.

It would be great if Rails included a select_with_auto_complete.

I would love to see how others tackle the issue from a UI standpoint.