When creating a searchable dropdown from existing HTML, the dropdown item's value property in the element data is cleared when searching and no results are available. This is because, when the "No results" message is shown, the menuObserver mutation observer is fired which calls module.refresh(), which in turn calls module.refreshData() which removes the value and text data values from the item elements.

Here is a jsbin that reproduces the issue: http://jsbin.com/runetopasi/edit?html,js,output

Here is the code that removes the value and text data from the items:

. Could you please explain the reason behind this code? Otherwise, simply removing these lines will fix this issue.