Simple search using a single category in Craft CMS

Question

I am relatively new to Craft and I am having a little trouble understanding how to build a simple search which will allow me to have dropdown of my categories which will return the selected category and return results on /products/results page.

I have a category called "Products" and have the following categories "Fruit", "Vegetables", "Dairy", "Herbs", "Eggs", and "Misc". I would like to have these categories in a dropdown menu which would allow visitor to select the category they would like to view. I also need it to show all product when they select "All Products", with "All Products" being the default value.

Thank you for your help.

Answer 1

You can build you categories dropdown using the craft.categories tag. Your Form submission field will end up looking something like this in HTML:

<form action="search/results" method="get">
    <select name="querySlug">
      <option value="*">All products</option>
      <option value="fruit">Fruit</option>
      <option value="vegetables">Vegetables</option>
      <option value="dairy">Dairy</option>
    </select>
    <input type="submit" value="Search">
</form>

Your results page will behave similar to the example results page in the Craft docs, except, instead of passing your query to a craft.entries.search() tag, you'll want to pass it to the craft.categories.slug() tag and then hand off the CategoryModel you get back to the craft.entries tag using relatedTo():

{% set querySlug = craft.request.getParam('querySlug') %}
{% set category = craft.categories.group('productCategories').slug(querySlug) %}
{% set entries = craft.entries.section('products').relatedTo(category) %}

All categories are returned by default, so you just have to handle that in a conditional if somebody selects that option. Here is a simple way you could do that:

{% set querySlug = craft.request.getParam('querySlug') %}
{% set category = craft.categories.group('productCategories').slug(querySlug) %}

{% if querySlug == "*" %}   
    {% set products = craft.entries.section('products') %}
{% else %}
    {% set products = craft.entries.section('products').relatedTo(category) %}
{% endif %}