Question

I’m using cakePHP 1.3 and would like to use AJAX from my search view to the search action in my controller. I was using prototype and scriptaculous and it was working fine, but need to use purely jQuery.

The search action basically looks as follows:

    public function search() {
    if (empty($this->data)) {
    } else {
        $request = $this->data;
        $this->set('data', $this->Event->search($request['Event']['search']));
    }  
}

The view currently looks like:

<script type="text/javascript">

$(function() {

    $(".search_button").click(function() {
        var searchString    = $("#search_box").val();
        var data = searchString;

        if(searchString) {

            $.ajax({
                type: "POST",
                url: "/events/search",
                data: data,
                beforeSend: function(html) { // this happens before actual call
                    $("#results").html('');
                    $("#searchresults").show();
                    $(".word").html(searchString);
                },
                success: function(html){ // this happens after we get results
                    $("#results").show();
                    $("#results").append(html);
                }
            });    
        }
        return false;
    });
});
</script>

<div id='container'>
<h1>Corporate Events</h1> 

<form method="post" action="search">
    <input type="text" name="search" id="search_box" class='search_box'/>
    <input type="submit" value="Search" class="search_button" /><br />
</form>
<div id="searchresults">Search results :</div>
<ul id="results" class="update">

What is the best way to make the ‘data’ variable available to $this->data in the controller? I checked the other threads with similar questions, but was unable to see how to do this.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Send it as POST ( refer to http://api.jquery.com/jQuery.post/ ) or url_encode (google “javascript url encode”) the string and append it to the url. Not sure which was is better, both should work and be easy to implement.