Search function with multiple keywords

Question

hi everybody,
im a beginner apex developer, im trying to develope a search function on my page.
i have created an item "where" where u can give the adress u r looking for.
my problem is that the search works only when i insert one word into the item e.g. street or city.
when i try to look for street and city at the same time it doesnt work.
in my database i have columns for city, street, zipcode... etc
and im using Application Express 3.1.2.00.02
this is my search code
select country, city,zipcode, street
from mytable
where
+( lower(city) like '%' || lower(trim(:P1_WHERE)) || '%'+
OR lower(zipcode) like '%' || lower(trim(:P1_WHERE)) || '%'
OR lower(street) like '%' || lower(trim(:P1_WHERE)) ||  '%'
OR lower(country) like '%' || lower(trim(:P1_WHERE)) || '%')
i have tried to solve the problem by adding combination after OR:
lower(concat(trim(city) like '%' ||  lower(replace(:P1_WHERE,' ','')) || '%'||,trim(zipcode) like '%' ||  lower(replace(:P1_WHERE,' ','')) || '%'||))
but this is not working. and i will have too many combinations.
any help is highly appreciated!
Edited by: user12976392 on 14-Jun-2010 07:08

Answer 1

Oracle don't provide any SPLIT() function, I don't know why.
But you can use INSTR() and SUBSTR() functions instead.
There are some split functions on the web, like this one for example (don't really split but get tokens) : http://glosoli.blogspot.com/2006/07/oracle-plsql-function-to-split-strings.html.
Then you can loop to get all the tokens (here I used the ' ' separator) :
DECLARE
      oneToken VARCHAR2(100) ;
      cpt INTEGER := 1;
BEGIN
      LOOP
      oneToken := get_token(html_GetElement(P1_WHERE).value, cpt , ' ') ;
      EXIT WHEN oneToken IS NULL ;
      cpt := cpt + 1 ;
    END LOOP ;
END ;Using this you can build your query as string, then open a cursor to run it, using :
open my_cursor for my_string;I really don't know if it's the best way to do this, it's just an idea.