How do you use JRoute in Joomla to route to a Search menu item?

I am trying to create a a box in a template in Joomla! that will display all of the keywords and link them to their appropriate search page. I have a menu item set, however, I don't want to hard-code the menu item into the template, so I want to use the JRoute object to generate the SEF url.

I am using this function:

JRoute::_('index.php?option=com_search&searchword='.$keyword);

or this:

JRoute::_('index.php?option=com_search&view=search&searchword='.$keyword);

however, this generates a url like this:

/component/search/?searchword=africa

when it ought to create a search url like this:

/searchmenuitem?searchword=africa

I have searched extensivly online and havn't found a solution to this problem. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Ok, so some additional information for you.. I am only experiencing the problem when I try and route the URL from a template in com_content. If I try and route the url from a template in com_search everything works perfectly. So, what is it about com_content that is causing this to not work properly?

thanks! david

In joomla administration page go to the menu item you've chosen for the search results page and get the id of that menu item (itemId).

Than you can try using:

JRoute::_('index.php?option=com_search&view=search&Itemid=256&searchword=asdsadasdsa');

or even

JRoute::_('index.php?Itemid=256&searchword=asdsadasdsa');

both should result in: /searchmenuitem.html?searchword=asdsadasdsa

EDIT: To make it more comforable you could add itemId as a param to your template.

There is another way, where u can get the itemId from the database (this method is required on multilingual websites). Let me know if you want it.

EDIT2: Here it is:

$db   =& JFactory::getDBO();
$lang =& JFactory::getLanguage()->getTag();
$uri  = 'index.php?option=com_search&view=search';

$db->setQuery('SELECT id FROM #__menu WHERE link LIKE '. $db->Quote( $uri .'%' ) .' AND language='. $db->Quote($lang) .' LIMIT 1' );

$itemId = ($db->getErrorNum())? 0 : intval($db->loadResult());