Question

My script is working perfect as it stands, but I have been trying to resolve a way to pass session values (to maintain the form search criteria values) between two browsers on different machines (for sharing the query results).

I am looking at two approaches:

1) Extract the url parameters from the search string url path eg: …url/50/1/4/5/98764 and echo them back out in the values of the search form.

2) Use a session (which I am using now to maintain the values) for an independent user. And this is working fine for a single browser of course.

My main question is what approach is best to share search results while maintaining the search values in the form fields?

YES. I am aware it’s a bad idea to share session info like this, but its required I have no choice!

Answer 1

Best practice would be #1, extract the parameters from the url and display them on the form. You can keep it pretty clean by keeping the parameters for the url and form the same. I use a whitelist to extract and push to the view:

function search() {
    if(isset($this->data)) {
        // redirect to search with named params
        ...
    } else {
        $whitelist = array('param1','param2','param3');
        foreach($whitelist as $param) {
            if(isset($this->params['named'][$param])) {
                $this->data['Model'][$param] = $this->params['named'][$param];
            }
        }
    }
}

Assuming you have your form something like:

echo $form->input('param1'),
     $form->input('param2'),
     $form->input('param3')