Question

I have basic stored procedure that performs a full text search against 3 columns in a table by passing in a @Keyword parameter. It works fine with one word but falls over when I try pass in more than one word. I’m not sure why. The error says:

Syntax error near ‘search item’ in the full-text search condition ‘this is a search item’

SELECT     S.[SeriesID], 
           S.[Name] as 'SeriesName',
           P.[PackageID],
           P.[Name]     
FROM       [Series] S
INNER JOIN [PackageSeries] PS ON S.[SeriesID] = PS.[PackageID]
INNER JOIN [Package]       P  ON PS.[PackageID] = P.[PackageID]
WHERE CONTAINS ((S.[Name],S.[Description], S.[Keywords]),@Keywords)
AND   (S.[IsActive] = 1) AND (P.[IsActive] = 1) 
ORDER BY [Name] ASC

Answer 1

You will have to do some pre-processing on your @Keyword parameter before passing it into the SQL statement. SQL expects that keyword searches will be separated by boolean logic or surrounded in quotes. So, if you are searching for the phrase, it will have to be in quotes:

SET @Keyword = '"this is a search item"'

If you want to search for all the words then you’ll need something like

SET @Keyword = '"this" AND "is" AND "a" AND "search" AND "item"'

For more information, see the T-SQL CONTAINS syntax, looking in particular at the Examples section.

As an additional note, be sure to replace the double-quote character (with a space) so you don’t mess up your full-text query. See this question for details on how to do that: SQL Server Full Text Search Escape Characters?