Question

I want to build a search form in a .net desktop application which is used to basically search through a transaction table, say Customer Orders.

I will be having a lot of search filters which are obviously non mandatory and based on the parameters, will populate the result set and will bind it to a data grid.

Basically I should be able to generalize the generation of the form, so that I font need to deploy the dll/exe every time I add a new search filter.

I may want to add/remove new fields in the grid from time to time and I like to handle these sort of changes by and large using SQL so that there wont be any need of deploying the dll/exe

Now I want to know what’s the efficient design methodology to build this one.

My environment is .NET 3.5, C#, SQL Server 2008

Answer 1

In SQL have a table with the columns to search. Read from that table to build the search options. So you can add a column to the search table and not redeploy. If you want allow users to search from all columns then read in the columns from the table directly.