Site search with CodeIgniter? - php

Question

I need to make a simple site search with pagination in it; could anyone tell me how to do it without affecting the URL structure? Currently I'm using the default CodeIgniter URL structure and I have removed index.php from it. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

You could just use a url like /search/search_term/page_number.
Set your route like this:
$route['search/:any'] = "search/index";
And your controller like this:
function index()
{
$search_term = $this->uri->rsegment(3);
$page = ( ! $this->uri->rsegment(4)) ? 1 : $this->uri->rsegment(4);
// some VALIDATION and then do your search
}

Answer 2

Just to update this question. It is probably best to use the following function:
$uri = $this->uri->uri_to_assoc()
and the result will then put everything into an associative array like so:
[array]
(
'name' => 'joe'
'location' => 'UK'
'gender' => 'male'
)
Read more about the URI Class at CodeIgniter.com

Answer 3

Don't quite understand what you mean by "affecting the url structure". Do you mean you'd want pagination to occur without the URL changing at all?
The standard pagination class in CI would allow you to setup pagination so that the only change in the URL would be a number on the end
e.g if you had 5 results to a page your urls might be
http://www.example.com/searchresults
and then page 2 would be
http://www.example.com/searchresults/5
and page 3 would be
http://www.example.com/searchresults/10
and so on.
If you wanted to do it without any change to the URL then use ajax I guess.

Answer 4

Code Igniter disables GET queries by default, but you can build an alternative if you want the url to show the search string.
Your url can be in the notation
www.yoursite.com/index.php/class/function/request1:value1/request2:value2
$request = getRequests();
echo $request['request1'];
echo $request['request2'];
function getRequests()
{
//get the default object
$CI =& get_instance();
//declare an array of request and add add basic page info
$requestArray = array();
$requests = $CI->uri->segment_array();
foreach ($requests as $request)
{
$pos = strrpos($request, ':');
if($pos >0)
{
list($key,$value)=explode(':', $request);
if(!empty($value) || $value='') $requestArray[$key]=$value;
}
}
return $requestArray ;
}
source: http://codeigniter.com/wiki/alternative_to_GET/