zend framework urls and get method - zend-framework

Question

I am developing a website using zend framework.
i have a search form with get method. when the user clicks submit button the query string appears in the url after ? mark. but i want it to be zend like url.
is it possible?

Answer 1

As well as the JS approach you can do a redirect back to the preferred URL you want. I.e. let the form submit via GET, then redirect to the ZF routing style.
This is, however, overkill unless you have a really good reason to want to create neat URLs for your search queries. Generally speaking a search form should send a GET query that can be bookmarked. And there's nothing wrong with ?param=val style parameters in a URL :-)
ZF URLs are a little odd in that they force URL parameters to be part of the main URL. I.e. domain.com/controller/action/param/val/param2/val rather than domain.com/controller/action?param=val&param2=val
This isn't always what you want, but seems to be the way frameworks are going with URL parameters

Answer 2

There is no obvious solution. The form generated by zf will be a standard html one. When submitted from the browser using GET it will result in a request like
/action/specified/in/form?var1=val1&var2=var2
Only solution to get a "zendlike url" (one with / instead of ? or &), would be to hack the form submission using javascript. For example you can listen for onSubmit, abort the submission and instead redirect browser to a translated url. I personally don't believe this solution is worth the added complexity, but it should perform what you're looking for.

Answer 3

After raging against this for a day-and-a-half, and doing my best to figure out the right way to do this fairly simple this, I gave up and did the following. I still can't believe there's not a better way.
The use case that necessitates this is a simple record listing, with a form up top for adding some filters (via GET), maybe some column sorting, and Zend_Paginate thrown in for good measure. I ran into issues using the Url view helper in my pagination partial, but I suspect with even just sorting and a filter-form, Zend_View_Helper_Url would still fall down.
But I digress. My solution was to add a method to my base controller class that merges any raw query-string parameters with the existing zend-style slashy-params, and redirects (but only if necessary). The method can be called in any action that doesn't have to handle POSTs.
Hopefully someone will find this useful. Or even better, find a better way:
/**
* Translate standard URL parameters (?foo=bar&baz=bork) to zend-style
* param (foo/bar/baz/bork). Query-string style
* values override existing route-params.
*/
public function mergeQueryString(){
if ($this->getRequest()->isPost()){
throw new Exception("mergeQueryString only works on GET requests.");
}
$q = $this->getRequest()->getQuery();
$p = $this->getRequest()->getParams();
if (empty($q)) {
//there's nothing to do.
return;
}
$action = $p['action'];
$controller = $p['controller'];
$module = $p['module'];
unset($p['action'],$p['controller'],$p['module']);
$params = array_merge($p,$q);
$this->_helper->getHelper('Redirector')
->setCode(301)
->gotoSimple(
$action,
$controller,
$module,
$params);
}