[Autocomplete] allow clearing the value also programmatically

[jaritheman]

Duplicates

• I have searched the existing issues

Latest version

• I have tested the latest version

Summary 💡

When the options for Autocomplete are likely to change over time, it means that a situation is likely that currently selected value is no longer available in the options. In such case Autocomplete starts spamming a "The value provided to Autocomplete is invalid." warning to the console.

It would be quite important to be able to handle the situation and for example then clear the value programmatically (=essentially call the same function that the manual clear button calls). Currently this does not seem to be possible.

Examples 🌈

SO thread about it with some code: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/76515033/mui-autocomplete-how-to-clear-value-when-options-change

Motivation 🔦

Better interface to handle an edge case

[michaldudak]

Yes, I think including something like this could be a good thing. Ideally, the autocomplete would use a reducer internally and we could expose a dispatch function that would allow you to trigger different actions (similarly to how Base UI compound components work), but we're not there yet.

cc @DiegoAndai, @mj12albert

[DiegoAndai]

@michaldudak your idea on how to implement this would have to be added to the useAutocomplete hook?

I will add the waiting for upvotes label.

[michaldudak]

Yes, it could live there, but it requires some bigger refactoring of the hook (which we plan to do anyway)

[DiegoAndai]

Cool, let's keep it in mind for whenever we get to the refactor.

[Jaswanth-Sriram-Veturi]

+1, I just encountered this and came here searching for the issue

[doougui]

+1, also encountered the same issue