You will need a separate textbox for each pattern for which the user wishes
to search. This of course, will be problematic. If you provide two
textboxes, the users will tell you they need a third. After you provide that
one, they will of course demand a 4th ... ad nauseam
You might consider a keyword-table approach, especially if users will only
ever be searching for whole words. This will involve creating a table that
includes the key field(s) from the first table, plus a single field for the
keywords. You would probably want to exclude "nuisance" words from the
keyword list: "the", "to", "a", etc. Including them would cause too many
unrelated results to be returned in searches (Google has a similar
approach). The result would be like this:
Sourcetable:
ID textfield
1 A phrase with several words
Keywords:
ID Keyword
1 phrase
1 several
1 words
Your criterion would be in the ID field and would look like this*:
IN (Select ID FROM keywords WHERE "," & [txtwords] & "," LIKE "*," &
[keyword] & ",*" )
*This is untested and was included only to provide a general idea for how to
approach this.
Bob
The field I'm searching has one or more words. Can I enter one, two
or three words or do I have to use more txtboxes?
Thank you for your help
Bob Barrows said:
sebastico said:
In Access 2003.
In a form I have a parameter to search for a word at a a time
Like [Froms].[Form].txtWords]&"*" which works well.
.
In order to enter more than two oarameter separated by commas in
txtwords I have been tryin the Str function like this
"Instr([txtWords])"
"Instr[txtWords]"
The query displays no records at all.
Could you suggest me how to do it
I don't think it's doable. If the field you were searching contained
only single words and you were trying to match the entire word, the
Instr solution can work. But since you are doing pattern-matching
using LIKE, there is no way to search for multiple patterns without
using OR
to combine them:
Like [txtword1] & "*" OR Like [txtword2] & "*"
It appears you will need to provide multiple textboxes and instruct
the users to enter a single search pattern into each.
--
HTH,
Bob Barrows
.