带有友好URL的CakePHP表单提交
I have to rewrite a form in a CakePHP application. The form searches a list of car sale ads and is pretty complex (~10 fields: model, manufacturer, fuel type etc.). Currently, the form is sent via POST
and is working quite well. The problem is I need to create bookmarkable URLs from the search queries and I was wondering what was the best way to accomplish this.
I tried passing 'type' => 'get'
to the $form->create()
method, but this generates a URL like usercars/search/?model=...&[...]
and causes the search to break.
I want the URL to be something like <some routing>/<Manufacturer>/<Model>/<Fuel>/<etc>
, and also to support parameter omission (i.e. <some routing>/<Manufacturer>
to list all the cars from the given manufacturer, even if the other parameters are missing). By POST
, currently this works. If I select only one of the params, it gives me the correct results.
I wonder if there's any way to determine cake to build the nice url from the form submission and maintain compatibility with the $this->data
way of handling input in the controller. I've gone through the documentation and haven't found any way to do this.
I already have two alternatives:
- rewriting the controller action to support function parameters instead of working with
$this->data
, building a route that targets the search method with the params and doing a redirect in the controller'sbeforeFilter()
method to a URL that corresponds to the route. - doing javascript on the search form page to build the URL + the above way of handling it.
What would you recommend?
There is a built in way to do this via cake's named arguments. So if you structured your links to look like
/controller/action/manufacturer:toyota/model:prius/
In your controller action, they would be available in $this->passedArgs as an associative array that looked like this
Array
(
[manufacturer] => toyota
[make] => prius
)
See also:
http://book.cakephp.org/view/46/Routes-Configuration
Here is an example of using prototype to dynamically create the form url on submit (using prototype).
Event.observe(window, 'dom:loaded', function(e1)
{
$("formid").observe('submit', function(e)
{
this.select(".inputclass").each(function(input)
{
name = input.readAttribute('name')
val = name.match(/data\[.*\]\[(.*)\]/);
if(val && val[1])
{
name = val[1]
}
$("formid").action += "/" + name + ":" + $F(input);
});
return this.submit();
});
});