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I’ve been asked this a few times now so I thought I would blog my solution to point others to this next time I am asked.

Often times people will create a simple search on their site. The most obvious way to do this is with a simple textbox and button.  You then handle the search when the button is clicked in the code-behind.

It may look something like this:

    protected void btnSearch_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(txtSearch.Text.Trim()))
        {
            BindSearch(txtSearch.Text.Trim());
        }
    }

Pretty straight forward.  The problem here is you’re doing a postback to the same page.  You won’t have a history of the previous searches in your browser. After doing a search and you want to see what you had for results from the previous search and simply hit back in your browser you’ll see this

So what I have always done to avoid this is to simply do a Response.Redirect to the page instead of just calling the BindSearch() method and put the search term in the query string.

    protected void btnSearch_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(txtSearch.Text.Trim()))
        {
            Response.Redirect("/Search.aspx?search=" + txtSearch.Text.Trim());
        }
    }

This is a pretty simple solution, does anyone else have a different way to handle this?

Filed under: asp.net,Errors,Web Development   Tags: .NET,
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