How to change the order of the form fields of the catalog advanced search form

Question

I have added a couple of custom attributes to the catalog advanced search form, but they appear in the order you add them. With the last attribute added at the bottom of the form. I would like to change the order of form fields to make it a bit more intuitive for my visitors. How can I do this?

Answer 1

The advanced form in the base template is in the file app/design/frontend/base/default/template/catalogsearch/advanced/form.phtml and it loads the attributes to show as part for a foreach loop.

It uses the function call Mage_CatalogSearch_Block_Advanced_Form::getSearchableAttributes to load the attributes. Which intern loads a collection of attributes with the filter use in advanced search but sadly only uses attribute id as the order.

->setOrder('main_table.attribute_id', 'asc')

I see you have two options:

1. Extend Mage_CatalogSearch_Model_Advanced::getAttributes and set your own order in the collection. You could extend the attribute table to have a new column to order attribute by.
2. Extend Mage_CatalogSearch_Block_Advanced_Form::getSearchableAttributes and perform some form of processing on the attributes so that they appear in the order that you desire.

For me option 1 would be the cleanest and you could extend the system so that the admin user could specify the order they want, but it would also be the most work.