Question

I’m writing a fairly complex stored procedure to search an image library.

I was going to use a view and write dynamic sql to query the view, but I need to use a full text index, and my view needs outer joins (MS-SQL 2005 full-text index on a view with outer joins)

So, I’m back to a stored procedure.

I need to search on (all optional):

• a general search query that uses the full text index (or no search terms)
• one or more categories (or none)
• a single tag (or none)

Is there a way to do a conditional FREETEXT in the ‘WHERE’ clause? The query may be empty, in which case I want to ignore this, or just return all FTI matches.

…AND FREETEXT(dbo.MediaLibraryCultures.*, '"* "') doesn’t seem to work. Not sure how a case statement would work here.

Am I better off inserting the category/tag filter results into a temp table/table variable, then joining the FTI search results? That way I can only do the join if the search term is supplied.

Thoughts?

Answer 1

Hmm, I thought there was no short-circuiting in sql server?

AND (@q = '' OR FREETEXT(dbo.MediaLibraryCultures.*, @q))

seems to work just fine!

Strangely, the full text scan is still part of the execution plan.