Question

I’m trying to implement a facebook search in my system (auto suggest while typing).
I’ve managed to code all the ajax stuff, but I’m not sure how to query the database.

I’ve created a table called People which contains the fields: ID, FirstName, LastName, MiddleName, Email.
I’ve also created a FTS-index on all those fields.

I want to create a stored procedure that will get as a parameter the text inserted in the query box and returns the suggestions.

For example, When I will write in the textbox the query “Joh Do”
It will translate to the query:

select * from People where contains(*, '"Joh*"') and contains(*, '"Do*"')

Is there a way to do that in stored procedure?

P.S
I’ve tried to use the syntax

select * from People where contains(*,'"Joh*" and "Do*"')

but it didn’t returned the expected results, probably because it needs to search the words on different fields. Is there a way to fix that?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Try

select   *
from     People
where    (FirstName  Like '%'+ @FirstName  + '%') and
         (MiddleName Like '%'+ @MiddleName + '%') and
         (LastName   Like '%'+ @LastName   + '%')

Also you may want to restrict the results to only return a maximum of say 10 by using:

select top 10

EDIT 1:

OK I now understand the problem better. I would use dynamic sql thus:

First create a split function e.g. Example Split function using XML trick

Then use dynamic sql:

declare @tstr varchar (500)

set @tstr = ''

select  @tstr =@tstr + ' Contains(*, ''"'+ val + '*")' + ' and '
from  dbo.split(@SearchStr, ' ') 


set @tstr =  left(@tstr,len(@tstr)-4)

select @tstr
Declare @dsql as varchar(500)

set @dsql = 'select * from People where '+ @tstr

exec (@dsql)

Also please note as per Remus, be aware of SQL Injections, the use of sp_executesql (instead of EXEC) would be better.