Hi,
I have been at this for many days with no luck. To start with, I will list the things I have tried:
Jari's example
Tom's Blog (My Book Store)
Skillbuilders plugin
Select2
For solutions I have tried straight tabular forms, classic report to table then making it editable, making the report region manually with select apex_item......
Here is what I am trying to do. This is a time card application. They have a very long list of bill codes (a few thousand). There are about 15 bill code categories. I want to have the billing item show up in a text field with an icon to the right.

These are the needs I am trying to meet. They are in order of priority so if the last one or two can't be done, it will still be acceptable.
1. Click on button to the right of the field (Time Detail) which launches a modal popup. There would be a select list to narrow the bill code by category. The next list select list would be a cascade of the first one. When the user clicks the item in the select list, it sends it back to the calling page and stuffs it into the text field called Time Detail.
2. This would need to work for both existing records and when the Add Row button is pressed.
3. When the user creates a new record, if they know the beginning code (INF-2017-001), they could paste that into the cell and it would autocomplete at the onblur stage.
4. If the autocomplete fails because there are two records with the same starting code (INF-2017-001), then it would automatically launch the modal with it just showing the two that they need to pic from. This would happen when they try to tab away from the field.
I was going to try to put this on apex.oracle.com but it is 5.1 and I don't see how to access a 5.0 environment. And in 5.1 tabular form isn't an option any more because of the IR Grid. I am on Apex 5.0.1.00.06
Help! I've been stuck for several days and have created a bunch of pages trying to get this to work and each solution had an issue.
Thanks