Allow sharing of route via url

[13hannes11]

It would be fantastic to be able to link to searches and exact connections.

This would allow me to directly send and save connection links that i have searched for at an earlier stage.

[jbruechert]

I think the reason why this currently does not exist is that that would require storing all found connections for an umlimited amount of time.

[felixguendling]

With arbitrary URL length, connections could be encoded into the URL itself as JSON?

Edit: alternatively, we could use web local storage. Of course this is not cross-device or cross-browser but at least the connection is not completely gone.

Additionally, we could have a "save" button that just saves the connection JSON to disk. Then maybe with drag&drop we could get it back to display it.

[13hannes11]

An alternative approach could be to recompute the search and show closest marching connections based on the URL.

So I see it as a two step thing:

1. Have searched encoded in the URL (thus making it possible to redo a search based on the user)
2. Allow additional filter parameters to reduce the number of connections that show up via the URL. For sharing an individual connection a filter could be applied that only allows finding the exact connection such as start time, number of switches and destination time. If the connection has changed due to live data it could simply give an error message that the connection seems to be out of date.

I understand that 2. might be more complex and error prone to implement but at least having searches use a URL would make the use of the webui easier.

[felixguendling]

With realtime updates you can have different search results every minute. So at least in those situations, it doesn't help.

[13hannes11]

That is true for saving an exact connections but for saving a search in terms of making it easy to find connections from A to B with given filters (instead of needing to redo the search each time) URL parameters would be helpful.

[felixguendling]

I guess it would be doable to just transfer to HTTP GET parameters of the /api/v1/plan endpoint to the website itself.