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Symfony2 forms, search and SEO friendly Urls

Ok, this is the problem:

I have a search form where I have several input fields to specify a search request. I use Symfony2 forms to benefit from validation, CSRF-protection and all the good jazz.

Now, I want the URLs of the search results to be both SEO friendly and bookmarkable.
e.g.

http://www.example.com/blue-car-in-Berlin-200km/

My current approach after doing some research is building the desired search slug and redirecting to another action like so:

//some form code
if($searchForm->isValid()){
   $searchWidget = $searchForm->getData();

   if(!empty($searchWidget->getSearch())) 
       $slug = $searchWidget->getSearch();
   if(!empty($searchWidget->getPlace())) 
       $slug .= '-in-' . $searchWidget->getPlace()->getName());
   if(!empty($searchWidget->getDistance())) 
       $slug .= '-' . $searchWidget->getDistance().'km';

   return $this->redirectToRoute('app_search', array('search'=>$slug));
}

With the second controller which is basically supposed to look like this:

public function searchAction(Request $request, $search)
{
    //extract actual terms out of the $search - slug
    ....
    //find a way to inject the terms in the current request-Object (dirty)
    ...
    //do all validation again
}

As already stated in the code this feels really inefficient and cumbersome. Isn’t there a better way to do all this? Like having a URL representation which is independent of the actual logic?

Furthermore, is there even a clean solution to use all the benefits of symfony form without actual request parameters but with that request slug?.

Thanks

Tags:

2

Answers


  1. 0

    I think you need SEO bundle for this.

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  2. 0

    You could define the route for the search action like that (I’m using annotations here):

    /**
 * @Route("/search/{search}-in-{place}-{distance}km", name="app_search")
 * @Method({"GET"})
 */
public function searchAction(Request $request, $search, $place, $distance)
{
    // Your code here
}

    Of course this is valid if those three search parameters are the only one needed and only if they are all three mandatory; if the search parameters are not mandatory, you have to define more routes to match all the possible combinations (and I think this is not the right way).

    A simpler solution is maybe to create a dynamic slug (it can have one or more values) with some sort of fixed formatting from which you can easily extract all the desired search values. But at this point I would like to ask: why don’t you use some simple GET parameters (something like /search?search=blue+car&place=berlin&distance=200)?

    Update

    Expanding the idea of a flexible search string, you could try something like that:

    /**
 * @Route("/search/{searchString}", name="app_search")
 * @Method({"GET"})
 */
public function searchAction(Request $request, $searchString)
{
    // Your code here
}

    searchString can be something like that (“<…>” is a placeholder for the real data like “city-berlin”):

    city-<...>/distance-<...>/place-<...>

    You just have to explode by ‘/’ and then, for each piece, explode by ‘-‘ and use the first piece as ID for what to search. The first explode should return something like that:

    [
    'city-<...>',
    'distance-<...>',
    'place-<...>'
]

    The second explode on each of those elements should return

    [ 'city', '<...>' ]

    This method is the most flexible because the order of the search parameters doesn’t matter and no parameters is mandatory for the analysis.

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