在CakePHP中使用搜索表单时的漂亮URL

Question

At the moment I have a basic search form set up and working. This is in my view:

<form action="/search" method="get" id="search">
    <input type="text" name="q" placeholder="Enter search terms..."><input type="submit" value="Search">
</form>

And my action simply executes the following:

$this->set('recipes', $this->paginate(array(
    'Recipe.name LIKE' => '%' . $this->request->query('q') . '%'
)));

This results in URLs like http://mysite.com/search?q=querystring. While this is all well and good, I'd like to have the URL as something along the lines of http://mysite.com/search/querystring.

Is there a way to achieve this which doesn't involve redirecting the user after they submit the form? If that's the only way I'd rather stick with using the $_GET parameter.

Answer 1

A much better approach for this would be a redirect after a POST. Why? Here are the four top reasons:

1. It will allow your users to bookmark searches much easier (read on for reasons)
2. The resulting url is much more readable, i.e. what you want to achieve
3. easier caching for search-results
4. reloads are much faster (if results are cached)

Want to know how to achieve it? Read on...

1. If you hit a submit on a form it will be a post to a specific location. That location uses the form-data to identify the searchterm. It will then do a http redirect to a second url
2. the second url will be according to whatever your requirement is.

have a look at this, it makes things more clear.

source: http://www.phphatesme.com/blog/webentwicklung/postredirectget-pattern/ - good german article on this subject. Sorry for hotlinking the image.