Preserve search state when transitioning between search page and workspace page.

[Zodiase]

The idea is to pass the search query (basically everything in the search string on Search Page) to other pages as a query parameter, then other pages can use this value to go back to the specific state of the search page.

This is limited to how much of the state is preserved in the url, but is a more generic solution since it works across page redirections.

[Zodiase]

Simply reading location.search in search result item component doesn't work since they won't get an update to re-render when location is changed.

This means the props passed to the search result item component need to react to search state changes or simply location changes.

Passing FlowRouter queryParams all the way into the components doesn't work since FlowRouter doesn't pickup location changes made by SearchKit. Also the component that renders all the result items, <Hits>, doesn't pass extra props to children. The search result item components have to get the info from Redux state.

Also there is no hook for when SearchKit updates location.

Maybe SearchKit can be patched so it goes through FlowRouter to update the location. This would be ideal.

The current workaround is to read location info whenever SearchKit query returns. It looks like the location is updated in-between SearchKit sending a request and receiving the response. When the value of location is read, save it into global Redux state, then read it in the search result item components.

Conclusions

• Search result item components have to get search state from Redux state.
• Which means some logic has to place the search state into Redux state.
• For now, the necessary search state to maintain is the query string in the url.
• It's better to ask the router for query parameter values then re-inventing the wheel to parse the query string.
• For which, FlowRouter needs to be connected to SearchKit so FlowRouter always has the latest url info.
• There is no reasonable hooks SearchKit provides related to location updating, other than a customizable history API. It looks like SearchKit is purely using the history API to update the location. Therefore providing a compliant history API that receives the location-changing requests and calls FlowRouter accordingly should do the trick.

[Zodiase]

Trying to mock a history interface for FlowRouter.