Search help

Poster: guitar187
Dated: Tuesday March 23 2004 - 23:37:06 GMT

I recently setup a search form in the menu. Everything seems to work fine, except for the results that I'm getting.

For instance, I have a search form setup in the middle of my index page. If I run a search from there everything seems to work fine. However, if I run the search from the Milonic menu, I don't get any results. Any ideas would be appreciated.

Below is my code for both the menu and the index page. Also my URL is http://www.alliemae.org


My menu code looks like this:
with(milonic=new menuname("Search")){
style=XPMenuStyle;
overflow="scroll";
margin=4;
aI("text=<form action=http://alliemae.org//SearchEngine/search.pl method=get><div align=center><font size=-1><input type=hidden name=p value=1 /><input type=hidden name=lang value=en /><input type=hidden name=include value= /><input type=hidden name=exclude value= /><input type=hidden name=penalty value=0 /></font> <font size=-1><input type=text name=q maxlength=15 size=15 /></font><br><font size=-1><input type=submit value=Search name=submit /></font> </div></form>;type=form;align=center;");
}


My index page code looks like this:
<form action="http://alliemae.org//SearchEngine/search.pl" method="get">
<h6 align="center">
<input type="hidden" name="p" value="1" />
<input type="hidden" name="lang" value="en" />
<input type="hidden" name="include" value="" />
<input type="hidden" name="exclude" value="" />
<input type="hidden" name="penalty" value="0" />
<font color="#FFFFFF"> Search for:</font>
<input type="text" name="q" />
<input type="submit" value="Search" name="submit" />
</h6>
</form>

Poster: kevin3442
Dated: Wednesday March 24 2004 - 3:53:59 GMT

Hello,

Haven't tried putting a form inside of a menu item myself, but offhand I have a couple of suggestions:

The form in the body and the form in the menu item generate two different queries (I searched for mortgage as a test):

Form in the body (works):

Form in the menu item:

Note that the differences are in two of the parameters passed in the url: include and exclude. From the menu item search, they are passed as %2F. Why? Because %2F is the url code for a forward slash (/)... the hex equivalent of decimal 47 in the ISO 8859-1 character set. How'd it get there? Two reasons: (1) you didn't specify a value for those two hidden fields in the form (you have value= but no value), so... (2) it took the next character, /, as the value, because you close some of your tags with /> instead of > (I'd avoid doing that unless you have a specific reason for it).

What to do? In the menu item search, use two consecutive single-quotes to assign a null value to the exclude and include hidden fields... don't put a space between them. Like so:

That's my guess as to the main culprit.

Let us know if that helps.

Kevin

Poster: guitar187
Dated: Wednesday March 24 2004 - 7:11:26 GMT

Works great! I definitly feel a bit dumb, but I sincerely appreciate your help. Let me know if you ever need a favor.

Thanks,

Jon

Poster: kevin3442
Dated: Wednesday March 24 2004 - 16:52:30 GMT

Hi Jon,

I hope that's not from anything I said. Believe me, I've been there several times myself... I have the palm marks on my forehead to prove it.

Glad it worked. I like your site layout by the way, and the menu looks good.

Kevin