Display Solr search form on every pages

Question

I'm working on a site which uses Apache Solr for the site search which is on the URL /search/site/.

What I want to do is add a form to every page on the site which allows the user to entered text in & submit it. The form will then take the user to the /search/site/ page displaying the results for their search term.

This sounds like it should be simple but I cannot see how to do it, I cannot find a way of creating a block for it & when I try to use the code below to programmatically display the form it is presented to the user but when submitted they are taken to the correct page (/search/site/) but the results of their search are not displayed.

$search_form = drupal_get_form('search_form');
$search_form_box = drupal_render($search_form);
print $search_form_box;
print render(drupal_get_form('search_form'));

I wasn't 100% sure that "search_form" was correct but when submitted it does take you to the correct search results page (/search/site/) but no terms or results are displayed.

I'm quite new to using Drupal & Solr so if there's any information you need that I missed out please ask.

Answer 1

I managed to work this one out, to get the block ready to be displayed I used preproccess_region (see code below)

function THEMENAME_preprocess_region(&$variables){
    $site_search_block = module_invoke('search', 'block_view', 'search');
    $variables["site_search_block"] = render($site_search_block);
}

Then in in my region .tpl file (region--menu.tpl.php for me) I put the following code to display it.

<?php if($site_search_block){ print $site_search_block; } ?>

As an additional bit of information if you want to edit the output of the form as I did, although I didn't ask about it here, this function should help you:

function THEMENAME_form_search_block_form_alter(&$form, &$form_state, $form_id) {
    $form['#id'] = 'siteSearchForm'; //Set form element ID

    //The form elements (I think)
    $form['search_block_form']['#title'] = t('Search'); // Change the text on the label element
    $form['search_block_form']['#title_display'] = 'invisible'; // Toggle label visibilty
    $form['search_block_form']['#size'] = 10;  // define size of the textfield
    //$form['search_block_form']['#default_value'] = t('SEARCH'); // Set a default value for the textfield

    //Submit button element values
    $form['actions']['submit']['#value'] = t('GO!'); // Change the text on the submit button
    $form['actions']['submit'] = array('#type' => 'image_button', '#src' => base_path() . path_to_theme() . '/img/search-icn.png');

    //Add extra attributes to the text box
    //$form['search_block_form']['#attributes']['onblur'] = "if (this.value == '') {this.value = 'SEARCH';}";
    //$form['search_block_form']['#attributes']['onfocus'] = "if (this.value == 'SEARCH') {this.value = '';}";

    //Prevent user from searching the default text
    //$form['#attributes']['onsubmit'] = "if(this.search_block_form.value=='SEARCH'){ alert('Please enter a search'); return false; }";

    //HTML5 placeholder attribute instead of using the javascript
    $form['search_block_form']['#attributes']['placeholder'] = t('SEARCH');
}