Customize FAST Search Form on Results.ASPX

Question

My business case requires four custom fields which are cascading drop down lists (Country > Region > State / Prov > City. The selection from the 4th dropdown list will result in a value that will be used as the search text. I want to replace the search text box with these four custom fields while leaving all the refiners and search results alone.

Is this possible to do? If so what's the best route? I'm comfortable with creating web parts and custom development if need be.

Answer 1

After looking into this, one way to handle this requirement is to:

1. Go to the default FAST search page
2. Edit the page
3. Either add a new search tab or use the default home tab
4. Edit the Search Box web part
5. In Miscellaneous update the "Advanced Search Page URL" to point to the custom form.
6. When you submit your custom form, have it return to the original search page with the format http://myURL/search.aspx?k=mySearchTerm

You can use the default advanced search page to test different ways to return values in your URL.

This solution pretty much mimics the default advanced search functionality. I'd like to see if I could drop the web part onto the search page itself. However this met the business requirements and for now that's what I need to do.