I am currently working on a project that has a fairly large search form - the form is 30 or fields or more.
Now I can of course map this out for routing by having my application pull the parameters and handle it as usual - but as you can imagine having that many fields can grow the URL to the near max character limit and becomes difficult to manage.
My question is this I suppose - what mechanism do people generally deploy for this? Should I store search criteria in the session and have it expire? That is the only way I can see getting around forcing the pagination to "post" variables (via javascript etc. to continue the search criteria).
I'm looking to keep this as manageable as possible. This search criteria is in a private application so I do have room for flexibility.
This is being built in PHP, JavaScript, CSS and isn't using any specific flavor of framework - although it is using the traditional MVC design pattern.
Any thoughts, help, past experiences handling this is appreciated.