hi,

i'm fairly new to SQL and i'm trying to do a web-based search page which takes 2 or more parameters and checks if they are present in any of 4 or 5 fields inside a certain table.

i've created some SQL but its pretty mess and i'm sure not ver efficient... can anyone let me know the best way of doing this?

thanks in advance.

dog


current dodgy code :
SELECT * FROM tblProjects WHERE project_type1 IN ('varSearch1', 'varSearch2') OR project_type2 IN ('varSearch1', 'varSearch2') OR project_type3 IN ('varSearch1', 'varSearch2') OR project_brief like '%varSearch1%' OR project_brief like '%varSearch2%' OR project_comments like '%varSearch1%' OR project_comments like '%varSearch2%' OR project_title like '%varSearch1%' OR project_title like '%varSearch2%'

How about this sql?

thanks for your reply.....

i'm fairly new to SQL and wasn't aware you could use the || ..... are these used the same as commas? anyway, i get an error when i use them so maybe its not what you meant :-)

my second problem is that the SQL example you gave searches only on one parameter. how would i do something similar but with 2 parameters?

thanks again for your help.

Just a warning when concatenating strings. I got this from the Oracle documentation...

<<<ORACLE DOCUMENTATION>>>
Although Oracle treats zero-length character strings as nulls, concatenating a zero-length character string with another operand always results in the other operand, so null can result only from the concatenation of two null strings. However, this may not continue to be true in future versions of Oracle. To concatenate an expression that might be null, use the NVL function to explicitly convert the expression to a zero-length string
<<<END DOCUMENTATION>>>