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Searching in Jomres


When Jomres is installed on a Joomla/Mambo web server typically a menu option is added to allow site visitors to view the component. If the component has more than one property registered on it, and the user isn't doing something specific like going to the booking form, then a search for properties is triggered. 

The number of properties returned on a page is governed by the CMS Global configuration option "List limit".

If Jomres detects that a search hasn't been triggered through a search module then it will do a random search. A random set of property uids will be returned and displayed, the number of properties returned is governed by the Site Config option Random search limit. A common error is setting the Global configuration List Limit to the same number as the random search. If you do this then you'll never see the page links that take you to the next set of results.

Jomres has four main search modules available to it, imaginatively titled jomsearch m1 through to m4. These are highly configurable search modules and are installed via the Plugin Manager.

When a search module is installed it is installed to, like most modules, the /modules folder. It will also create a sub folder mod_jomsearch_mN where N = the number of the module. Here is srch.html which is used to format the output of the module.

There are many configuration options but to summarise the modules offer you the ability to mix and match the search options you wish to utilise. You have the choice of offering them as drop downs or links. If you choose to then you are able to offer combined searches to your web site visitor. If you select links then you're defining specific searches (for example, you would be offering a search on a specific room type).

Note. Another common error is to offer searching by property name as one of the drop down options. If you do this then searches will always return the property named in that drop down, regardless of the other options chosen in the search form.

If you are in doubt of what a parameter does hover over it's label, there is extended information about an option that will be viewable in an overlib popup.

A tutorial on using the search modules is available here.