New Search Form, Updated Documentation

As mentioned in the developer forum, we recently rolled out a new user interface for the search form that's an integral part of the basic search control. Part of this change is better support for decoupling the search form from the result set and building custom search forms when you are coding to the raw GSearch() layer. The system now supports two new modes of operation which are covered in our online documentation:

1. Using the GdrawOptions() object, you can now set the location of your search form in a way that decouples it from the rest of the search results. This is useful, for example, when you want a search form in the sidebar of a page, with results stacked in the center. A new sample, searchformroot.html demonstrates this.
    


2. For those of you not using the search control, and instead coding to the raw GSearch layer, a new GSearchForm() object has been created. This object is designed to build a search form for you that is identical to the one used in the search control, but in this object, you control the various submit and click events, and you have direct access to the input element. Several of our sample applets and solutions have been converted to use this new object including places.html, the video search solution, and the map search solution.
   

When you have a chance, please take a look at these new features, and if applicable, please migrate your applications to this new model.



On a separate topic, we've also added some documentation for the Map Search solution. It now includes step-by-step instructions for how to add it to your page and configure it. This has become a popular solution and we wanted to ensure that more people could easily take advantage of it.