Question

I would like to make a form I have in my website self referencing. Or if that’s not an option, how would I go for, for example, showing the results of a search I make in my site?

I have a site in which you search for places and it returns a list of places for your preferences. At the moment my script creates a new node every time a user searches but this isn’t convenient anymore. How do I change it so that the page content is changed and I see the results instead of the search form?

Thanks,

Answer 1

You should redirect your form to a page passing a query string with the string of what the user searched and then use $_GET[‘search_param’] in your search/restuls page to handle what will be displayed to the user.

function yourform_form($form_state) {
    $form = array();
    //$form['your_search_field']
    $form['#submit'][] = 'yourform_form_submit';
    return $form;
}

function yourform_form_submit(&$form, $form_state) {
    $query = 'search_param='. $form_state['values']['your_search_field'];
    drupal_goto('search/results', query);
}

If you’re using Drupal 7 your submit function should look like:

 function yourform_form_submit(&$form, $form_state) {
        $options['query']['search_param'] = $form_state['values']['your_search_field'];
        drupal_goto('search/results', $options);
    }

After you submit you should be redirected to http://yoursite.com/search/results?search_param=my_search_value

Note that this technique is used by popular search engines:

https://www.google.com/search?q=my_search_value