Help finding correct search URL

[rickdude]

Hi, everyone,

 

I've finally worked up the courage to experiment with workflows a bit. My mission is to modify the included Should I Watch this Movie? workflow to add a search on the site allcinema.net, to give me the Japanese title of the movie (useful when hoping to see the movie in Japan).

 

I made a new Action to open the URL http://www.allcinema.net/prog/search_all.php/?search={query}

When I use the workflow, a blank window opens up for allcinema.net.

 

If I remove the slash before the question mark

http://www.allcinema.net/prog/search_all.php?search={query}

the allcinema.net site is opened along with the other three, but unfortunately the search string doesn't seem to be being passed to the site to search on, the site giving me the error message (in Japanese) that "No search string was input".

 

Can anyone give me some pointers to finding the right URL for this search?

 

Thanks,

Rick

[dfay]

Well that site uses a post rather than get command for sending the form (you need to view the source of the web page to see this...), so it doesn't include the query in the url ordinarily. See http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_httpmethods.asp for a longer explanation.

But if you view the source you can figure out that the text field where the search is entered is named SearchTxt . So the following should work for you:

http://www.allcinema.net/prog/search_all.php?SearchTxt={query}

Without going too deep into this you're never going to want to add a slash before the question mark. The question mark tells the server that what follows are the parameters for the search. If you put in a slash, the server would think the name of the web page is a directory. See also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Query_string .

Edited April 4, 2015 by dfay

[rickdude]

Thanks, day, that worked perfectly!