Need advice for building a search in an ASP.NET MVC application.

Question

I've been googling but haven't found any good info on building a good search function in a ASP.NET MVC project.

Off the top of my head, a search feature for searching authors and books would look like this:

char[] delimiterChars = { ' ', ','};
string[] searchterms = SearchBox.Split(delimiterChars);
IQueryable<SearchResult> SR = _db.Books.Where(e => 
    (e.Title.Contains(SearchTerm[0]) || e.Author.Name.Contains(SearchTerm[0]))
    && (e.Title.Contains(SearchTerm[1]) || e.Author.Name.Contains(SearchTerm[1]))
    //&& repeat for as many words were entered in the search box
    )
      .Select(e => new SearchResult
      {
          Title = e.Title,
          Type = "Book",
          Link = "Book/" + e.BookID
      });

Questions

1. Is there a better way of doing this?
2. If not, how can I dynamically construct my SQL query to look for as many search terms as were entered?
3. Can I append search results from a second search to the SR variable?

Other Considerations

In the search above I am searching for results that match the Book or Author. Maybe immediately after I want to do a search just looking for a match in the Author table, and then append those results to the SR variable results from the first query. I don't know if that's the most practical approach, but can it be done?

Answer 1

My first inclination would be to offload this to something like Lucene.Net. Short of that, you could do this:

char[] delimiterChars = { ' ', ','};
string[] searchterms = SearchBox.Split(delimiterChars);

var temp = _db.Books.AsQueryable();
foreach (string term in searchterms)
{ 
  temp = temp.Where(e => 
    (e.Title.Contains(term) || e.Author.Name.Contains(term));
}

IQueryable<SearchResult> results = temp.Select(e => new SearchResult
{
  Title = e.Title,
  Type = "Book",
  Link = "Book/" + e.BookID
});

Note the foreach that dynamically builds the query.