Displaying a “no search results” message when no search results are found

In earlier (4.x) DNN versions, when you make a search and it yields no results you are presented with an empty search results page – without any message. It’s silly, but nobody ever included this as a feature.

 

Thanks to this post, I found a way to include a “no search results” message. Or course, there are plenty of ways to do that, but I think this is the fastest. You’ll have to edit the admin/search/searchresults.ascx file as follows:

 

First, find this line and add what’s written in big, bold letters:

 

<asp:HyperLink id=”lnkTitle” runat=”server” Name=”result” CssClass=”SubHead” NavigateUrl=’<%# FormatURL(DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem,”TabId”),
DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem,”Guid”)) %>’ Text=’<%# DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, “Title”) %>’>
</asp:HyperLink>

 

Then add the following code directly under the last line of the file:

 

<div id=”NoResults”>
<h3 class=”red” style=”text-align:center”>No Search Results Found</h3>
</div>
<script language =”Javascript”>
var search;
search = document.getElementsByName(”result”);

if (search.length == 0) {
document.getElementById(”NoResults”).style.display=’block’;
}
else {
document.getElementById(”NoResults”).style.display=’none’; 
}
</script>

 

Change the “No Search Results Found” string to whatever you like and you’ll have your “no results” message when your search yields nothing. Of course, you can also change the h3 tag with whatever you like, even include an image.

 

I don’t know what’s going on with 5.x versions since I haven’t tried it yet in one, but I think it’s still an interesting tweak for 4.x versions.

 

EDIT: This may not work if you leave the single and double quotes as they are in the code above. Better paste the code to Notepad first. Sorry about that, but I didn’t have the time to replace. (Live Writer can be very unfriendly sometimes :) )