Help passing criteria within a "search maze"...

...I am building a five page search "maze" with PHP and MySQL. What I mean by maze is - on the first page, the user is presented with four categories the user may want to search. Each page has many search criteria in the form of checkboxes and pulldowns (i.e no text fields).

So basically, on the first page the user can choose to search criteria on any combination of pages - i.e. 2, 3 and 4. So on page 2, the user would select search options then get routed to page 3, where he/she would select more search options, then again get routed to page 4 where he/she would select more options, then query the database with all the criteria combined.

I have already created a system for routing the user through the pages, but I'm not sure how to pass the search variables from page to page with new variables being added on each page - or even IF I should be passing the search variables from page to page!

Am I going down the right path? Or should I be quering the db after each page and caching the results in the background without showing the results until the last page is done? (and if so - how do I do it?)

PLEASE HELP!!!!!!

- TIA!

That is the quickest way to drive a user browser your site crazy.

Absolutely not - you should allow the ability to search anything through your site in one form.

No - see the above.

You are doing things the hard and inefficient way.

How much data do you have to search through? How many different types of searches do you want to allow? Are you currently using regular expressions in your search queries or are you using the more efficient and faster full text search capabilities of MySQL?

jpenn,

On the whole I agree with you--I hate multipage forms too. It's definitely nicer to input everything all at once and click "go" to get results, right now. I can however envision situtations where that would be difficult to implement: imagine dynamic dependencies where selecting one option would change a good portion of the form. In those situations, you might need to write a whole lot of JavaScript to make it work, and even then it's not always possible because sometimes the adjustments to the form have to come from server-side...

Mojoman,

It really depends on what your form is supposed to accomplish. Again, try not to design it too many levels deep; try to keep as much input grouped together on one page when you can.

Very simplistic, but you can do something like this in your form action script: