Re: [AUCTeX] reftex-citation to complete from all citations instead of just ones used previously?

[Michael Hoffman]

On 07/09/2012 04:45 PM, Michael Hoffman wrote:
> When I start AUCTeX there are no completions available for
> reftex-citation. I have to give it a regular expression first and then
> after selecting a citation it will be in the history for reftex-citation
> and also I can tab-complete to it in the prompt for reftex-citation.
>
> It seems like it would be easier to just tab out a citation key if I
> know its beginning and have the citations completed from the
> bibliography database instead of history. Is this possible?

I figured out how to do this, which I've described in response to a 
question http://stackoverflow.com/a/11660493/494061 as well. I will copy 
my response here:

The documentation of reftex-citation is a bit confusing. It promises 
completion on known citation keys but I believe "known" refers to keys 
that have been used previously in this session rather than all keys in 
the appropriate bibliography. You can use the 
LaTeX-add-all-bibitems-from-bibtex command defined below to load all 
keys in your bibliography:

(defun get-bibtex-keys (file)
  (with-current-buffer (find-file-noselect file)
    (mapcar 'car (bibtex-parse-keys))))

(defun LaTeX-add-all-bibitems-from-bibtex ()
  (interactive)
  (mapc 'LaTeX-add-bibitems
        (apply 'append
               (mapcar 'get-bibtex-keys (reftex-get-bibfile-list)))))

Suggestions on appropriate hooks to make this happen automatically are 
welcome.

Thanks!
Michael