Persist QueryString parameter on RouteLink

Question

I'm implementing a basic search feature for a site I'm working on. The cleanest way so far seems to be to create an action with a method signature similar to:

//
// GET: /BeautySchoolDropouts/Search?page=2&q=grease

public ActionResult Search(int? page, string q)
{
  //Implementation
}

I have some code then on the search results page that provides the paging links similar to:

<%= Html.RouteLink("<< Previous Page", new { page = (Model.PageIndex - 1) }) %>

<%= Html.RouteLink("Next Page >>", new { page = (Model.PageIndex + 1) }) %>

Since I'm supplying the route values as part of the RouteLink method, is it impossible to keep the q=whatever part of the querystring? Right now, the links generate /BeautySchoolDropouts/Search?page=2 only, which obviously causes issues because I have no idea what the search was for.

Answer 1

I think this would work assuming you are putting the query string in the model somewhere (this code uses Model.QueryString; Note when I say "query string" here, I'm talking about the query parameter, not the HTTP query string); I don't think you want to persist the whole query string because then you'd get ?page=1&q=whatever&page=2&page=3.

<%= Html.RouteLink("<< Previous Page", new { page = (Model.PageIndex - 1), q = Model.QueryString }) %>

<%= Html.RouteLink("Next Page >>", new { page = (Model.PageIndex + 1), q = Model.QueryString }) %>