Styling links in jQuery UI autocomplete results

Question

I have read through many questions about styling of jQuery UI autocomplete however I still have a problem that I can not solve. I am creating custom rendering like this:

$('.license-input').autocomplete({
    source: "{{url(LaravelLocalization::getCurrentLocale().'/ajax/license')}}",
    minLength: 2,
    delay: 250
}).autocomplete('instance')._renderItem = function( ul, item ) {
    return $('<li>')
            .append('<a href="' + item.url + '">' + item.name + '</a>')
            .appendTo(ul);
};

So my <li> items contain links.

Now I want to style the dropdown and I use the following CSS (I have exaggerated the colors for visibility):

ul.ui-autocomplete li
{
    border:none;
    background-color:#f505f5;
    padding:10px 16px;
    font-size:12px;
    outline:0;
}

ul.ui-autocomplete li:hover
{
    background-color:#05e5e5;
}

ul.ui-autocomplete li a
{
    border:none;
    background-color: #f505f5;
}

ul.ui-autocomplete li:hover a
{
    border:none;
    background-color: #05e5e5;
}

However, the links does not get styled. What puzzles me the most is what I see when inspecting the result in Chrome's debugger:

You can see that the computed style for the active <a> element is the blue color, however the item itself has white background. What is this white thing that I should style?

I have already tried various selectors like .ui-state-active , .ui-state-hover , ui-state-focus , ul.ui-autocomplete li a:hover and others.

Note: the border: none; rule from the ul.ui-autocomplete li:hover a actually gets applied - without it the style looks different (has 1px black border around the link). So the only problem is the background.

Answer 1

Looks like the link in the list item has a background-image set. This will override any background colors you use.

You can set the background-image: none for that particular link

Something like:

ul.ui-autocomplete li:hover a
{
    border:none;
    background-color: #05e5e5;
    background-image: none;
}

Example of link with background image and one without: https://jsfiddle.net/yuwhuwkz/1/