ADF 11g: How to implement search form with automatic substring search

Question

We have ADF search form and result table on the same page. Say, VO that this search form is based upon is famous Employee table from HR schema. What we need is a logic when user enters partial employee first name ie: 'jo'...it should return 'john', johnny, joanne etc...
just like if user would use wildcard %
What worked in 10g ADF was something like this:
        AccessServiceImpl svc = (AccessServiceImpl)JSFUtils.EL("#{data.AccessService.dataProvider}");
        BirthViewNewImpl b = svc.getBirthViewNew();
        ViewCriteria vc = b.getViewCriteria();
        String staffId = JSFUtils.getFromSession("staffId").toString();
        String studyId = JSFUtils.getFromSession("studyId").toString();
        if (vc != null) {
            System.out.print("BR " + studyId + " " + staffId + " ");
            AttributeDef[] defs = vc.getViewObject().getAttributeDefs();
            Iterator criteriaRows = vc.iterator();
            while (criteriaRows.hasNext()) {
                ViewCriteriaRow r = (ViewCriteriaRow)criteriaRows.next();
                if (r != null) {
                    for (int j = 0, numAttrs = defs.length; j < numAttrs; j++) {
                         if (JboTypeMap.isCharType(defs[j].getSQLType())) {
                             String val = (String)r.getAttribute(j);
                             String col = defs[j].getColumnName();
                             if (val != null) {
                                 System.out.print(col + "=" + val + " ");//just to see what is going on
             System.out.println("");
        b.searchRecords();//method in VO that executes query
         * This is now very wrong.... Very artificial way to eliminate % from the UI
         if (vc != null) {
             AttributeDef[] defs = vc.getViewObject().getAttributeDefs();
             Iterator criteriaRows = vc.iterator();
             while (criteriaRows.hasNext()) {
                 ViewCriteriaRow r = (ViewCriteriaRow)criteriaRows.next();
                 if (r != null) {
                     for (int j = 0, numAttrs = defs.length; j < numAttrs; j++) {
                         if (JboTypeMap.isCharType(defs[j].getSQLType())) {
                             String val = (String)r.getAttribute(j);
                             String col = defs[j].getColumnName();
                             if (val != null) {
                                 val = val.substring(0,val.length()-1);//return to normal
                                   System.out.println("Column: " + col);               
                                   System.out.println("Value: " + val);               
                                   r.setAttribute(j,val);
        return null;The problem is for some reason this does not quite work in 11g.
What is the best practice to achieve this functionality in 11g?

Answer 1

Or use a catsearch index or a contains index in your query. The will preform much better for large datasets as it doesn't do a full table scan.
Google for Oracle Text ( http://www.google.de/search?q=%27oracle+text%27+catsearch&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:de:official&client=firefox-a )
Timo