Question

I know this is a simple question but here it goes. I’ve created a search button in Visual Studio using an SQL Statement. It works for first name and last name, but I also want it to search int such employee Id’s. Here is the code :

SELECT ID, fName, lName, Discription, Box 
FROM tb1 
WHERE (fName LIKE '%' + @fName + '%') OR (lName LIKE '%' + @lName + '%') OR (ID LIKE '%' + @ID + '%')

When I test it, I get the error :

"Conversion failed when converting the varchar value '%' to data type int.

Answer 1

You cannot use LIKE with integers, so you will have to convert the ID to varchar.

To convert you can use CAST or CONVERT:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms187928.aspx

Ex:
CAST(ID as varchar)

Your query:

SELECT ID, fName, lName, Discription, Box 
FROM tb1 
WHERE (fName LIKE '%' + @fName + '%') OR (lName LIKE '%' + @lName + '%') OR (CAST(ID as varchar) LIKE '%' + @ID + '%')