(nebie) Autocomplete and many to one relationship?

All,

I’m trying to get autocomplete to work for the first time.

I’m not sure if I’m doing this right or not.

I have a table where one of the fields is a employees name. I expect a
relatively small collection of person’s names will be used.

I created a simple employees table with just 2 fields: id, and name.

Then in my main table I added a employee_id field and setup the
belongs_to:
/ has_many: entries in the models of each.

In my _form.rhtml I have the autocomplete line that is working:
<%= text_field_with_auto_complete :employee, :name %>

ie. If I start typing, I get a pull-down like entry populated from my
employees table.

The trouble is with the save at the end. Nothing is getting saved to
either
my employees table in the situation a new employee name is typed, and
not to
my main table.

First, is this supposed to work?

If so, do I have to add code to the update method for my main
controller?
None of the examples I’ve looked discuss doing so.

Greg