Possible to add type-ahead text field in SAIL?

You can certainly provide auto-completion. Appian provides components called as "pickers" - there is a user picker, group picker, user or group picker, document picker etc. There is also a record picker introduced recently in 16.1 version. However, if the data you want to display is something else (neither user/group/document/record), you can create a custom picker. A customPicker(a!pickerFieldCustom) requires that you supply a suggestionFunction to it. The suggestionFunctions should take one parameter and return datasubset containing "data" and "identifiers" field.

It is certainly not a bad practice to use it. If you do require auto-completion suggestion, you can decide to do it. However, if you are pulling data from DB in suggestFunction and the table has lot of data, there will be several DB calls made. The suggestFunction is executed everytime you type some character in the customPicker.(this is how you get autocompletion by matching the partial input you type) Hence, I would advise that your suggestFunction be as efficient as possible.

You can certainly provide auto-completion. Appian provides components called as "pickers" - there is a user picker, group picker, user or group picker, document picker etc. There is also a record picker introduced recently in 16.1 version. However, if the data you want to display is something else (neither user/group/document/record), you can create a custom picker. A customPicker(a!pickerFieldCustom) requires that you supply a suggestionFunction to it. The suggestionFunctions should take one parameter and return datasubset containing "data" and "identifiers" field.

It is certainly not a bad practice to use it. If you do require auto-completion suggestion, you can decide to do it. However, if you are pulling data from DB in suggestFunction and the table has lot of data, there will be several DB calls made. The suggestFunction is executed everytime you type some character in the customPicker.(this is how you get autocompletion by matching the partial input you type) Hence, I would advise that your suggestFunction be as efficient as possible.