Text_field_with_auto problem Help urgently requried

Rails
1

hello all,

I am developing a small system with ror, the system is designed not to
have a keyboard or mouse only a touchscreen and a barcode scanner, i
have used a textfield_with_autocomplete, this works fine when i use the
keyboard, i have created images for an onscreen keyboard which call
javascript to append the value to the text box, unfortunately this does
not activate the autocomplete, my code is below.

[code=]

<%= javascript_include_tag :defaults %> Allergen:

<%= text_field_with_auto_complete :ingredient, :name, :skip_style =>
false -%>

<%@topArr=[‘q’,‘w’,‘e’,‘r’,‘t’,‘y’,‘u’,‘i’,‘o’,‘p’]
for letter in @topArr%>

<%end%>

[/code] Any help with this would be greatly appreciated
<input type=button name="btn<%=letter%>" id="btn<%=letter%>" onclick="append('<%=letter%>')" value="<%=letter%>"