Question

I have an existing website developped using ASP.NET MVC 3 and Entity Framework 4 querying an Sql Server 2008 database. It contains a search form with around 10 fields, and when the user clicks the submit button I dynamically create an Entity SQL request containing only the specified search fields, omitting the empty ones. It works. So far so good.

Now, the client wants a Full Text Search behavior for one of the fields. I see this request as being pretty complex because (AFAIK) :

• Entity Framework does not natively supports full text search
• I want to avoid stored procedures to wrap the FTS syntax because so far I’ve only used “static” SPs, keeping the logic in the .NET code. So I want to try to avoid building the query inside the procedure. And creating one procedure per possible search field combination is not an option.

Solutions I could think of so far :

• Putting a stored procedure or user defined function as a seach preadicate in the WHERE clause (i’m not sure that’s possible though)
• Getting the FTS results alone in a temporary table, and execute the other filters on that temporary table. I’m afraid of poor performances if there are a lot of FTS results with this technique…

What’s the best way for daeling with this ?

Answer 1

Can you not just use raw sql? then you can keep the logic in your .NET code.

So, it would look something like:

string sql = "DO FULLTEXT STUFF";
MyObjectContext.ExecuteStoreQuery<MyEntity>(sql, .......);