AutoCompleteTextView backed by CursorLoader

Basically, androids autocomplete textview is not very powerful, when I have to deal with bigger amounts of data, what I do is, i keep a text change listener to the edit text for search, and then whenever something is changed on the edit text, it queries database.

If this might help someone, placing an edittext on onCreate

EditText etSearch = (EditText)findViewById(R.id.etSearchBox);
etSearch.addTextChangedListener(filterTextWatcher);

//The filterTextWatcher is 

private TextWatcher filterTextWatcher = new TextWatcher() {
     @Override
    public void afterTextChanged(Editable s) {
    }

    @Override
    public void beforeTextChanged(CharSequence s, int start, int count,int after) {
    }

    @Override
    public void onTextChanged(CharSequence s, int start, int before,int count) {
        adapter.getFilter().filter(s.toString());
        }
    };  

So, in your adapter, you need to create a getFilter() method…

@Override
    public Filter getFilter() {
    if (nameFilter == null) {
        nameFilter = new NameFilter();
    }
    return nameFilter;
}

    private class NameFilter extends Filter {

    @Override
    protected FilterResults performFiltering(CharSequence constraint) {
    FilterResults results = new FilterResults();
    Cursor cursor = null;
    // get your cursor by passing appropriate query here
    results.values = cursor;
    results.count = cursor.getCount();
    return results;
    }

    @Override
    protected void publishResults(CharSequence constraint, FilterResults results) {
    notifyDataSetChanged();
        }
    }