Fixed: Can't work out the rules to explain the search functionality

Question

I’m trying to write out directions on how to use the search so everyone will be able to understand it. I’m struggling myself because sometimes you need the % and sometimes you don’t.

The table that is being searched in the main grid has >100,000 rows. The tables that are behind the drop downs have at most a few hundred.

Why is it that one dropdown box searches part of the name but the other doesn’t…

Answer 1

This issue has been fixed in dbFront version 1.1.5.0013.

dbFront "intelligently" allowed for full like searches on tables smaller than 10,000 rows but forced you to specifically enter %keyword% when the tables were larger.​ I realized this was causing confusion.

The reason for this functionality is that doing a [LIKE "%keyword%"] search automatically forces your database to perform a full table scan. For small tables this is manageable by a decent database server. On larger tables this can cause significant performance issues.

This update to dbFront adds a setting where you the Admin can decide at what point users need to manually use the %keyword% syntax. The setting FullLikeRowLimit is found in the [Help] / [Settings] dialog under the service tab. See: Default Wildcard

In addition this release of dbFront is smarter about distributing the search across the various columns, some of which might be full-text indexed and others which might not be.

If you need your users to perform full-text searches on larger tables (1 million rows+) then you may want to enable Full-Text search.