The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #34186   Message #718700
Posted By: Jon Freeman
28-May-02 - 08:41 AM
Thread Name: Tech Hints PermaThread™
Subject: RE: Tech Hints PermaThread™
People sometimes seem to want to know how to give links to searches or threads using filters, etc. Here's how I do it or find out how to do it. It's a little bit messy but it seems to work with every form I have tried at Mudcat...

View the source of the page that contains the input form you would normally use to perform the search/filter and search for the form there. This will be in a section of the HTML that starts with <FORM> Some pages do contain more than one form but it is easy enough to work out which form is which.

When you have found the right form, read along to where is says "action=". This will give you the URL. Next, look through the form for lines sarting with <INPUT> or <SELECT> The "Name=" bit for these will give you the names of the paramaters to supply. The rule here is simple. The first paramater follows the URL and is preceded by a question mark (?), subsequent paramaters follow and are preceded by an Ampersand (&).

As an example, to use the filter, looking through threads.cfm you will find the form with the action threads.cfm. It has an input with the name "Title" and a select with the name age. So, to find all BS threads from the past 5 days, the URL would be

threads.cfm?Title=BS:&age=5.

The only other thing to know is that if you are providing a link from outside the main forum, you need to supply a full URL, e.g. http://www.mudcat.org/threads.cfm....

Jon