Thread

The site I’m building requires two ways to filter results—by category and by keyword search.  Users should be able to use either or both methods.  Unfortunately EE’s search module requires keywords in order to run.  If not keywords are supplied then we get this error: “You did not submit a search term”.

It’s the result of this block of code in the search module:

/** ----------------------------------------
        /**  Did the user submit any keywords?
        /** ----------------------------------------*/
        
        // We only require a keyword if the member name field is blank
        
        if ( ! isset($_GET['mbr']) OR ! is_numeric($_GET['mbr']))
        {        
            if ( ! isset($_POST['member_name']) OR $_POST['member_name'] == '')
            {        
                if ( ! isset($_POST['keywords']) OR $_POST['keywords'] == "")
                {            
                    return $this->EE->output->show_user_error('general', array($this->EE->lang->line('search_no_keywords')));
                }
            }
        }

I’m reluctant to mess around in here too much—there must be a supported way of searching just on categories, right?

For filtering without keywords look at using Dynamic parameters, that will allow you to have a single category drop down without a keywords field.

Fantastic, thank you.  I hadn’t seen those before.

The one thing I don’t think it gets around is the ability to search multiple fields, like find ‘foo’ in title OR body.  Do you know if that’s possible?

After a bit more digging I found that setting

<input type="hidden" name="member_name" value="">

tricked EE into thinking I was doing a member search and ignoring the keyword requirements.  Thanks for your suggestion, though.

Thanks for the assist, bluedreamer. Alex, glad you have a solution.

Don’t hesitate to post again as needed.

Closing on Sue’s behalf, as it were.