CakePHP project needs simple AJAX based query resonse

Thanks for looking! Here's what I have: *CakePHP project, very basic. Project is an Incident reporting/Invoicing/Customer/Accounting/Parts system for my business. *A customer database table with name, phone number and ID, etc. An invoice table that includes customer_id. -------- AJAX-based form element with customer database response: When I create an invoice, I use a form. I currently use a dropdown of all of my customers. I now have 250+ customers, and need to make things easier on myself. I would like to replace the dropdown with a text field that, after typing 3+ characters, searches a few fields ([login to view URL], [login to view URL], [login to view URL], [login to view URL], [login to view URL], [login to view URL]) and delivers a box with the possible alphabetical list of customer names. I then want to click on one of the responses and have it fill in the full customer name and id, so that when I submit my form, that customer_id becomes part of the submitted form. I want to be able to reuse this element without too much work on other pages. I have about 20 other projects that I would love to find a good programmer to work on. CREATE TABLE customers ( id INT UNSIGNED AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY, name VARCHAR(50), type VARCHAR(50), phone1 VARCHAR(50), phone2 VARCHAR(50), phone3 VARCHAR(50), phone4 VARCHAR(50), created DATETIME DEFAULT NULL, modified DATETIME DEFAULT NULL, notes TEXT, privatenotes TEXT );