#rubyonrails is pretty much worthless, so I figured I would ask here. In short, the question is how would you paginate search results? Pagination nor searching is the problem, there is a catch: There are roughly 30 parameters. I'm basically rewriting a PHP application, it uses a get request and with all of the options selected the URL is damn near 500 characters and it uses cryptic values such as:

http://www.example.com/index.php?p1=v1&p2=v2&p3=v3

I would like to be more elegant if possible, so get is a last resort. With the pagination_links helper you can pass the get information from one page to the next, that doesn't seem to be the case with post. Then it hit me, what about using the flash? After all, Agile Web Development with Rails calls it "Communicating between Actions", but I have a feeling that's not what they meant. There are also sessions, but as I understand it the flash stores it's information in sessions, so it could go either way.

I'm going to attempt to simplify the form a tad, perhaps using get will not be so bad, but how would you go about this? Any opinion on the mentioned methods, any methods that I left out? Thanks for any information, it's appreciated.