How do you implement a global search (to search directly in multiple columns)

[nouaim]

For example, we have a Teacher table which has 4 columns : fullName, email. gender, phone.
and we want to implement a global search:

is there a way to send : http://localhost:5000/api/teachers?pageNumber=1&pageSize=10&filter=something or http://localhost:5000/api/teachers?pageNumber=1&pageSize=10&search=something instead of sending big urls with big OR statement like this:

http://localhost:5000/api/teachers?pageNumber=1&pageSize=10&filter=(fullName%3D*something%7Cemail%3D*something%7CphoneNumber%3D*something)&orderBy=

and you can imagine if the collumns are higher than this.

[alirezanet]

Hi @nouaim, sry ignore my AI assistant first response (I delete it), it is apparently confused what you're asking, if you don't want to pass it as query string you can use post it as JSON, am I also missing something?

[nouaim]

i meant we don't send any column name as a param, can we just send the search directly, example instead of ?filter=Gender=Male we send ?filter=Male and the backend does it job by filtering in all collumns, the same if we want to search for a phone, instead of ?filter=Phone=4444 we send ?filter=4444

or maybe we have a param like globalSearch so we send ?globalSearch=Male

do you have a way to do it in the gridify library

[alirezanet]

You can manually create a helper method to implement something like this, but I don't recommend it, and No, we don't have something like this in Gridify for good reasons.

Basically, it is a bad idea to use a single search term for multiple unrelated properties in your backend. You degrade performance, add overhead to your system, and you will face unpredictable behavior passing the search values to a wrong data type. Imagine searching for john in a phone number property!

[alirezanet]

Don't do this, but if you need it for some reason, you can do something like this:

[HttpGet]
public IActionResult GetTeachers(
    string search, 
    [FromQuery] GridifyQuery gridifyQuery)
{
    // Build global search filter if search term provided
    if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(search))
    {
        var searchableFields = new[] { "fullName", "email", "phoneNumber" };
        var globalSearchFilter = string.Join("|", 
            searchableFields.Select(field => $"{field}=*{search}*"));
        
        // Combine with existing filter if present
        if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(gridifyQuery.Filter))
        {
            gridifyQuery.Filter = $"({globalSearchFilter}),({gridifyQuery.Filter})";
        }
        else
        {
            gridifyQuery.Filter = globalSearchFilter;
        }
    }
    
    return Ok(dataset.Gridify(gridifyQuery));
}