How to build correct URL when searching, sorting with pagination all are used.

[sachinsharma1507]

In my website, I am doing searching, sorting and pagination in combination for categories. The searching, sorting and pagination are all working fine separately. The searching is also working fine with pagination. But issue is regarding sorting. The sorting is not working correctly in combination with pagination and searching. Here are the following issues I am facing -


When sorting is done first and then pagination is used then sorting parameters are lost.

When pagination is done first and then sorting is used then sorting works but results are shown from very first page i.e. pagination parameter is lost.

Above two issues also persist for combination of sorting and searching.

The code also doesn't work for combination of these three features viz sorting, searching and pagination.

I want to preserve all the URL parameters in the query string so that these three features should work in any combination. If I try to preserve the query string then on next time the query string are repeated and append to existing parameters.

I am writing my necessary code to understand the issues; irrelevant code has been removed.

Here is my sorting code (the parameters are supplied to sql query in a class) -

// sorting
$orderBy = isset($_GET['orderBy']) ? $users_obj->filter_data($_GET['orderBy']) : "";
$sort = isset($_GET['sort']) ? $users_obj->filter_data($_GET['sort']) : "";

if(!empty($orderBy) && !empty($sort))
{
    switch($orderBy)
    {
        case 'category_name':
        $order = array("`category_name` $sort", "`category_order`");
        break;
        case 'post':
        $order = array("`post` $sort", "`category_order`");
        break;
        default:
        $order = array("`category_name`", "`category_order`");
        break;
    }
}
else
{
    $order = array("`category_name`", "`category_order`");
}

// sort order - by default results are already sorted in ascending order so on first click you will sort by desc
$sort = ($sort == "desc") ? "asc" : "desc";

// sort direction arrow - by default show ascending image, since results are already sorted in ascending order
$sort_arrow = ($sort == "desc" ? "images/asc.png" : "images/desc.png"); 

Here is how I am building my URL with parameters for pagination when searching is done and for default stage when no searching is used:

// $page_url and $page_suffix are being passed to pagination class
// if search request comes
if(isset($_GET['btnsearch']))
{
    // current page url with query string
    $page_url = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
    // if pagination request comes
    if(isset($_GET['page']))
    {
        $page_url = substr($page_url, 0, strpos($page_url, "&page"));
    }
    $page_suffix = "&page";
}
else
{
    $page_url = $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'];
    $page_suffix = "?page";
} 

Here is my HTML code which is table header column used to do sorting. Here I am used static sorting columns with dynamic sort order i.e. asc or desc.

 <th><a href="?orderBy=category_name&sort=<?php echo $sort; ?>">Name</a> <span class="arrow_dir"><img src="<?php echo $sort_arrow; ?>" height="12" width="12" border="0" alt="arrow" /></span></th>

I think here we need to make it dynamic so that search and pagination parameters don't get lost when sorting is done. But I don't know how? If I try to do it by using $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] then previous query string parameters are getting added to new one and making long wrong query string. So how can I do it in correct way. Please help me this. Thanks in advance.