Search with $_POST

condoug

I am keen to understand something i have seen on website search forms but cannot re-create or find an answer too.

When using $_POST for posted search criteria, the user gets redirected to lets say www.domin.com/searchesults.php and the search results are displayed. Then when you click an item from the list, view the details and then go BACK to the search results page, the search results are displayed fine.

However, whenIi do this on my search forms, when I hit BACK, Internet Explorer always says the page cannot be displayed and Firefox always asks me to re-POST the variables.

What is different about my search form to the others? I know I can fix this easily by using GET but the URL looks a mess.

Any suggestions?

Thanks

The-Master

If you show us an example of a site that does this then we could tell you how they, specifically do it.

You could do it in a number of ways. You could make it add a cookie called 'last search' or something like that with the last search and then if a cookie exists when the page is visited then it will display that search. Obviously this has a number of flaws but they could be sorted. I'm sure there are other ways you could do it too.

Anyway GET data is far superior when it comes to searches.

m3rls

The easiest way to avoid the "page cannot be displayed/repost the data" issues is to have a redirect page like most forums use which says something like "your search has been completed, please stand by while we take you to the results" etc.

What this effectively does is stops the browser from treating the results page as the page hit from the form submission. Usually, if the url is clean (no query strings like ?search=My+Search+Term), the search results are held in a session, which is then checked when the results page loads.

As The-Master said, there are many ways to go about it, but that's the simplest way to avoid the browser issue and retain the results that I can think of off hand.

Weedpacket

I agree with The-Master that GET sounds like the appropriate method to use for such a request. They're not called GET and POST for nothing, after all.

meigwil

Or try Jesse Skinner's clever method

http://www.thefutureoftheweb.com/blog/get-redirect-after-post

Best of luck,

Mei

eclipser221

Am i worng or does the $_POST variable only last on the one session that is open of that page?

m3rls

$_POST only exists on the page that the form action specifies.