CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpjavascriptjquery
egidra
egidra

Reputation: 347

Redirecting on a single search result?

When a user does a search on my website, and there is only one entry, then I want to redirect the user to the search result. The current way that I am doing this is poor. Here is how I am currently doing this:

If there is only one search result on the search result page, then I render a hidden input with an ID of "redirect" and a value of the link to redirect to. In the javascript, if the hidden input with ID "redirect" exists, then the user is redirected to the value of the element.

It's a poor way to do this because the single search result is loaded first, so the user actually sees that there is one search result. Then, it loads after, say, 3 seconds.

Is there a better way to do this?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 232

Answers (4)

Nic
Nic

Reputation: 13733

The issue with your logic is that you're waiting for something in the page to load THEN redirecting. I think a more elegant solution is to change the flow of things to give you a little more flexibility.

First, you're going to want to preprocess your query and check for the pertinent information; if there is one result, use the header(); redirects as mentioned. You may need to add some more information to the result set (database table) to make this possible.

I think taking this a step further, however, would be to redirect certain terms automatically as well. You'll kill two birds with one stone.

Let's say you have a database that is term and url - you could add certain terms to the list that also serve as a redirect. This is great for certain keywords that there are variations of. Use this sparingly though - it is great to use in conjunction with your site statistics. It may help you in instances where 0 records are shown.

Upvotes: 1

Lawrence Cherone
Lawrence Cherone

Reputation: 46620

<?php 
//Query & other stuff

$num_of_results=mysql_num_rows($result);
if($num_of_results==0){
    //no results

}elseif($num_of_results==1){
    //only 1 result
    //pseudo-code
    //get id or controller ect from result set
    header('Location: ./page/'.$id);
    die();
}else{
    //normal display of search results
    while($row=.......){

    }
}
?>

Upvotes: 1

citizen conn
citizen conn

Reputation: 15390

You should use PHP to determine if there is only one result, then do a server-side redirect like so:

header( 'Location: http://www.yoursite.com/redirect_page.html' );
exit;

Before printing anything to the page, check to see if there is only one result, and if so, render that script and exit so that nothing else gets processed.

Upvotes: 1

Jason Kaczmarsky
Jason Kaczmarsky

Reputation: 1686

You could use the header() PHP function to redirect if there is only 1 result.

header("Location: http://www.example.com/");

Upvotes: 3

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