POST and GET at the same time? (almost)

polc1410

OK this is going to be hard to describe so bear with me. The link here might help its a development version of http://carrierbagcollection.com

What I have is a search form - search.php (lots of drop down menu's etc) whcih submits to results.php using POST. results.php retrieves that information, queries a MySQL database and posts the results.

I've been asked to upgrade that to have a sort feature and to make it page (like google etc.) rather than list all the results at once. To do that I have set up links which use embeded variables in the URL and are retrieved with GET... ...I'm sure you see where this is going.

User does the search --> Results are displayed --> user clicks 'sort by colour' link which effectively reloads the same page but does an ORDER BY command in the mysql query. but it doesn't retrieve the previosuly POSTed search criteria so it is now sorting the entire database (no search criteria = show all records)

So here are the optiosn I think I have:

reprogram search.php to use GET instead of POST. But that could be problematic with big seraches running the URL over more than 255 chars which I think is the limit.
reprograme the embeded URLs - but how?

use POST - but can I do that from a HREF link? and what would happen to the existing POST data would it still be lost...
save the POSTED data and / or the the sort criteria into session variables and retrieve them from there..

is there an easier way? Is there something I am missing?

Calum

crazychris

saving to the session is a very good idea. No (realistic) size limits, and once loaded into tmemory, searching and sorting is lightening fast!

Get the results from the search on the database and save to an array in the session, then until they do a new search, always use the array to display the results.

polc1410

Ah? Another option I hadn't thought of... saving the SEARCH RESULT to the session... another pair of eyes always sees things differently

I had only thought of saving the search criteria to the session...

For paging I was only planning to use LIMIT x,y on the MySQL query. Would it be more efficient to omit the limit and save the result to the session and then manually limit it myself (should think that's easy...)

I know there is no limit on session size, but if I producved a big search (I expect eventually that the database will hold 3-5,000 records and it should be possible to search for 'all') with several users on at once would there be issues? Especially as I haven't written a clever way to close sessions when people shut their browser down...

LIMIT was my aim to keep database activity to a sensible amount, but I might need to remove it anyway because my databse is RELATIONAL and so SORT by BAG TYPE actually relates to a number and not the name the user sees on screen. The snag with that is SORTING wont actually ut things in a 'sensible' order for the user unless the relational list is in a sensible order (and countries aren't!). So I may have to read all the data and sort it... in which case I assume I am better doing that and saving it to a session variable than doing it for each screen refresh...

Calum

crazychris

I have a query to a slow (obdc -> BD2) database which can return 100,000+ results, these are saved in the session and can exceed a cupla MB, so far, no issues, and speed versus doing a requery was from 30secs on the 1st page (full query) down to < 1 sec on page 2, 3, 4 etc...