Articles/Books on creating a database driven search box in asp.net

mark_gilb · April 23rd, 2014, 05:35 PM

I have created a search box using LIKE "%" + [QueryString] + "%" however this is not powerful enough cuz it only good for one word searches, lets say I have "How are you doing today" stored in my database, a search with "How doing" will return ZERO results although we have that word, also if I type "doin today" without the "g" for "doing" I get zero results....

So do you know how to create a powerful Search Box?? Thanks

mmorgan30 · April 23rd, 2014, 08:43 PM

A powerful search text box would need a where clause for each search term and allow for operators. This approach you would need search terms parser to tokenize the search terms into a parse tree that you could iterate through building the search SQL where clauses.

i.e.
Brown + fox == where column like '%Brown%' and column like '%fox%'
Brown fox == where column like '%Brown%' or column like '%fox%'
"Brown fox" == where column like '%Brown fox%'

Another less powerful approach that would cover your scenario would be to replace all the spaces in your search term text box with a %.

example code in search button click event

Code:

 // resulting search terms would like this: %Brown%fox%jumped%over%the%couch%
 // for a text box containing: Brown fox jumped over the couch
 Search(String.Format("%{0}%",txtbxSearchTerms.Text.Replace(' ', '%')));