Check this out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIEcyOUcNQk

I looked through that video and I've added appends to the end of the view so it looks like this now.

    <?php echo $employees->appends(array("srch_lname" => Session::get('srch_lname'), "srch_fname" => Session::get('srch_fname') ))->links(); ?>

It does show in the url the proper search parameters when moving on to the next page though it doesn't actually keep the parameters in the function itself.

An example being after searching for l and moving on to the second page it shows

employees?srch_lname=l&srch_fname=&page=2

Or am I getting the values improperly?

Why are you using session?

Why not Input::get('srch_fname')?

You're passing them in the GET url.

When I changed it to Input::get it brought me back to the same issue I'm having, it doesn't append to the url at all when navigating to the next page.

EDIT/UPDATE: I'm thinking the appends is working properly though my issue may actually be the searching function itself just not able to carry the parameters over to the next page, if that makes somewhat sense.