In a search display template, is there a search property available for the actual text (k=…) in Srch.U or any of the search objects?

Question

I'm trying to add the searched text value to the query string in the url (<a href='...?searchText=[something]'>Title</a>)

In the search display templates, I see ctx and Srch objects exist that have a lot of properties about the current item and general search properties. However, I'm having an issue trying to get the actual searched value (in pairs or all in one string). I can extract it from the url hash since it's not in the querystring anymore, but I was wondering if there was a more standardized way to do this.

edit: for now, I have two methods to extract a querystring value and a hash value, and setting searchText (which is conditionally appended to the url) in the following way:

var searchText = "&searchText=" + GetHashVal("k") || GetQueryVal("k");

Answer 1

You can retrieve it from the DataProvider object. Which is accessible from within your display template.

ctx.DataProvider.get_currentQueryState()

This returns an object which gives you the whole search query context, like: keyword, sorting, refinement, ...

In your case you want to extract the keyword, which you can retrieve from the property like this:

var keyword = ctx.DataProvider.get_currentQueryState().k;