The action you have requested is invalid on search with no result

Question

I am using the simple search form on EE 2.8.1 with the following tag:

{exp:search:simple_form
                    channel="blog|products|faq"
                    where="any"
                    results="20"
                    form_class="et-search-form et-hidden"
                    no_result_page="/search/"
                    result_page="/search/results"

                }
                <input type="search" class="et-search-field" placeholder="Search …" value="" name="keywords" title="Search for:">
                {/exp:search:simple_form}

The form works as intended when there is a search result. If there is no search result the form will throw the error "The action you have requested is invalid".

Removing the no_result_page parameter will result in EE showing me "Your search did not return any results." message.

I suspect the secure form submission issue and included

 <input type="hidden" name="XID" value="{XID_HASH}">

But no luck.

Cheers

Answer 1

Try to modify your no search results parameter to include the index template of that group

no_result_page="search/index"

The parameter should include the template group and template:

http://ellislab.com/expressionengine/user-guide/add-ons/search/simple.html#no-result-page

Answer 2

In order to make this work, and not get the "The action you have requested is invalid" message when there are no results, I also had to set the template in the no_result_page parameter to a different template than the result_page template.

On further investigation, however, it seems that the problem specifically lies with the EE search engine returning "no results" and loading a template that uses the {exp:search:search_results} tag. (So, potentially, you could re-use the same template if you had some sort of conditional.)