Dear Wayne,

I see two possible ways of resolving your problem.

1st: Get data from the backend, and save it in some variable, and then use completerService.local instead of remote to autocomplete through your data.

Here's the code which you can use in this approach:

protected searchStr: string;
protected dataService: CompleterData;
protected searchData = [];

constructor(public completerService: CompleterService, private http: HttpClient) {
  this.http.get('https://restcountries.eu/rest/v2/all').subscribe((data: any) => {
    this.searchData = data;
    this.dataService = completerService.local(this.searchData, 'name', 'name');
  });
}

2nd: In the next release of MDB Angular we'll publish a new version of Auto Completer component. So you could use it after update to MDB Angular 7.2.0

Best Regards,

Damian