In-page searches

NOTE: This section is appropriate for MiniVend 3.09 and above.

You may specify a search inside a page with the [search parameters*] or [search_region parameters*] tag. The parameters are the same as the the one-click search, and the output is always a newline-separated list of the return objects -- by default a series of item codes.

The [loop ...] tag directly accepts a search parameter. To search for all products in the categories ``Americana'' and ``Contemporary'' you can do:

    [loop search="
        se=Americana
        se=Contemporary
        os=yes
        sf=category9
        "]
    Artist: [loop-field artist]<BR>
    Title: [loop-field title]<P>
    [/loop]

The advantage of the in-page search is that you can embed searches within searches, and you can have straight unchanging links from static HTML pages.

The syntax is a bit tricky because of the HTML style evaluation and the = signs in both argument types, so you may want to pre-set the search arguments with a search profile. Any string passed to the search tag that doesn't contain an equals (=) sign is considered a search profile name. Example:

    [set My search]
    mv_searchspec=Americana
    mv_searchspec=Contemporary
    mv_search_field=category
    mv_orsearch=yes
    [/set]

Now doing a search with [search My search] or [loop search="My search"] will use the above settings.

If you want to use the shorthand ``se=Americana'' notation, you can set the special scratch variable mv_search_arg:

    [set mv_search_arg]
    se=Americana
    se=Contemporary
    sf=category
    os=yes
    [/set]

A search with empty parameters, as in [search] or [loop search=""], will yield the same results. (You must define an empty string with quote marks for the second notation -- [loop search=] will not work.)

To place an in page search with the full range of display in a normal results page, use the [search-region] tag the same as above, except that you can place [search-list], [more-list], and [more] tags within it and use them to display and format the results -- including paging.

For example:

    [search-region   se=Americana
                     sf=category
                     ml=2
                     ]
    [more-list][more][/more-list]
    [search-list]
    <A MV="page [item-code]" HREF="flypage.html">
        [item-field title]<A>, by [item-field artist]
    [/search-list]
    [no-match]
        Sorry, no matches for [value mv_searchspec].
    [/no-match]
    [/search-region]

If you want to use the same page for search paging, make sure you set the sp=page parameter.

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In-page searches

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