default text and behavior for contact select field

[pyrojonc]

I have a public form that has a custom contact select field with a list of schools.  I need to change the default text from " - choose contact - " to " - Select School - " and I would like to customize the way the search field works so that it always searches from the beginning as a phrase (e.g. "notre dame high" would not return results with everything that contains "notre" or "dame" or "high", but only schools that start with "nortre dame high")

Any idea where to find the template / javascript files that would make that possible?

[Erik Hommel]

That depends entirely on how your public form has been created? Is it a CiviCRM profile, is it a Drupal Webform with CiviCRM integration, is it a View, is it a standalone form that uses the CiviCRM API, is it a stand alone form that retrieves data directly from the CiviCRM database? You need to give us some more information to be able to help you 

[pyrojonc]

Its a CiviCRM Profile stand alone form.

[Coleman Watts]

Which version of Civi are you using? The bug you're describing (search phrases containing spaces returning too many results) should have been fixed in 4.5.

[pyrojonc]

I'm on CiviCRM 4.5.6 on Drupal 7.34. There was a setting that I played with about auto wildcards and that stopped the search from returning results that had text starting in the middle of a word, but as soon as I add a space I get wildly mixed results.

[Coleman Watts]

I guess the fix did not include custom fields.
Are you interested in helping to fund or work on porting the fix over to support custom fields?

[pyrojonc]

I just saw this reply.  Yes Coleman, I would be happy to help with porting the fix over to custom fields.  How do I get started?

[Coleman Watts]

The fix was simply to replace spaces with wildcards. So I'd add something like str_replace(' ', '%', $input) to CRM_Contact_Page_AJAX::contactReference