Specifying Multiple Values Using the dsIDXpress Link Structure

Posted on January 3, 2011

This post is part of our How To Series for how to get the most out of your IDX. Subscribe now to get future How To’s and marketing articles.

dsIDXpress can display search results from the MLS based on a number of different link structures. The URL structure always starts with /idx/, so if your domain name is yourblog.com, the dsIDXpress “virtual” pages would always start with: yourblog.com/idx/. If you’re looking to do a search by city, community, tract or zip without any filters, your link structure would look like the following:

yourblog.com/idx/city/los-angeles – Shows 500 newest listings in Los Angeles, ordered by newest first.

yourblog.com/idx/area/the-village – Shows all of the listings (since total is less than 250) in “The Village” community/tract, ordered by newest first.

yourblog.com/idx/zip-92651 – Shows all of the listings (since total is less than 250) in the 92651 zip code, ordered by newest first.

yourblog.com/idx/860 – Shows all of the listings (since total is less than 250) that match the criteria in the Link ID 860 that was created in your Diverse Solutions Control Panel. Note: This is currently available for dsSearchAgent Pro users.

Specifying Multiple Values:

One thing you’ll come to find as you use dsIDXpress more and more is that it’s very flexible and you can specify multiple values when using the link structure to load MLS content to your blogsite. Basically, you want to use the following format for specifying multiple values:

idx-q-NAME<NUMBER>=VALUE

The NAME is the parameter name. NUMBER is any number starting from 0 and counting upwards as you add more values. VALUE is the value you want. So, using the example from the video, your link structure for specifying multiple zip codes is going to be:

daniellecordova.com/idx/?idx-q-zip<0>=92679&idx-q-zip<1>=92606

Note: It’s very important to use the angle brackets before the value otherwise your link structure will show results for one parameter and one value only and not for each of the multiple values.

Here’s a quick video tutorial on how to do all of this:

[youtube width=549 height=334]8NdXxEkCfbM[/youtube]