Error: cannot call methods on autocomplete prior to initialization; attempted to call method 'destroy'

I got the answer to it in the initialization of autocomplete widget...just add

$(this.target).find('input').autocomplete();

This will initialize the autocomplete widget this happened because in 1.10.* .Jquery has added error messages for usage of functions without proper initialization whereas it was not there in previous versions.


If you want to make sure the autocomplete widget is destroyed, you can check if it was actually initialized by inspecting the CSS classes of the target element, e.g.

if ($target.hasClass('ui-autocomplete')) {
    $target.autocomplete('destroy')
}