Question

Users will be hitting up against a URL that contains a query string called inquirytype. For a number of reasons, I need to read in this query string with javascript (Dojo) and save its value to a variable. I’ve done a fair amount of research trying to find how to do this, and I’ve discovered a few possibilities, but none of them seem to actually read in a query string that isn’t hard-coded somewhere in the script.

Answer 1

You can access parameters from the url using location.search without Dojo Can a javascript attribute value be determined by a manual url parameter?

function getUrlParams() {

  var paramMap = {};
  if (location.search.length == 0) {
    return paramMap;
  }
  var parts = location.search.substring(1).split("&");

  for (var i = 0; i < parts.length; i ++) {
    var component = parts[i].split("=");
    paramMap [decodeURIComponent(component[0])] = decodeURIComponent(component[1]);
  }
  return paramMap;
}

Then you could do the following to extract id from the url /hello.php?id=5&name=value

var params = getUrlParams();
var id = params['id']; // or params.id

Dojo provides http://dojotoolkit.org/reference-guide/dojo/queryToObject.html which is a bit smarter than my simple implementation and creates arrays out of duplicated keys.

var uri = "http://some.server.org/somecontext/?foo=bar&foo=bar2&bit=byte";
var query = uri.substring(uri.indexOf("?") + 1, uri.length);
var queryObject = dojo.queryToObject(query);

//The structure of queryObject will be:
// {
//   foo: ["bar", "bar2],
//   bit: "byte"
// }