How to make a RESTful search button?

Question

I need to do a search based on a term entered into a text box. Simply: user clicks something and results are returned.

This is fairly straight-forward, except I'm having a bit of difficulty actually implementing it. The problem is, I want to do this as RESTfully as possible, so I don't want to create a button as follows:

<input id="searchButton" type="button" value="Search" />

because this will POST the data to the server, and I don't want to do a POST because I'm not changing the state of anything. I'm retreiving data based on the value in the search box

I'd like to have it as a simple link, such as:

<a href="/Controller/Action">Search</a>

but it has to be styled as a button. If I was using the input, I could have CSS similar to:

.standardButtonStyle {
    background:url("../images/search_button.png") no-repeat scroll 0 0 transparent;
    border:0 none;
    color:White;
    cursor:pointer;
}

but I don't think I can apply this to the anchor tag. Can somebody tell me the right way to do this?

Answer 1

1) You can choose the method for your form. If you give the attribute "method='GET'" in your form tag, the request will not be a post, but a get.

2) You can use an input element with the type "button" if you want to create a button.

3) You can put an image tag inside the anchor tag which has the search button png as its src.

I think you got a little caught up in the complexity. It might be good to step back a little and focus at one issue at a time. I don't think, that you really need to make it as complicated as you seem to do it.

Answer 2

You should have a from element and you need to add the http request on the form

For example: <form action="/sharedorders" method="get">