Providing only keywords, this tool will write a simple search query, run it, and display your results; lightweight and easy to customize; in both control form, and standalone page
I was tired if writing SQL for doing simple queries on my databases, especially when they got loooong... so I ended up writing a program to do it for me. Now this is in no way a complex search tool, but it does its job. It does use 'LIKE' as I needed it to search text fields, but you can change that out if you want - this will get you started.
All you need to do to get it running is to provide 3 values:
- Either your DB ConnectionString, or the name of that ConnectionString in your web.config
- The name of the table you wish to search
- The column names you want to compare to the search terms
And that is it. The search is delimitted by [space], [comma], [semicolon], and [plus-sign] and each keyword must show up in at least one of the fields in order for the search to return results.
I provided both a standalone page that runs the search on itself, and a control version that consists of a user control that you can insert anywhere, and a search.aspx page that will show the results. The control is very versatile.
This is a good starting point if you want to expand on it. I made a fully customized search at work starting with this with multiple dropdowns, fields and textboxes, all built on this basic architecture. Play around with it and tell me what you think - I would even write a tutorial on how this thing works if anyone is interested.