SharePoint list view web part wildcard search

I know, most of the SharePoint developers are looking for this. As everyone knows we can do partial search on data view web part by passing a parameter to it and by using the expression "contains" we can implement partial search on a field or column. But, when you come to list view web part you can't pass the parameters [There is no support for list view web part like web part parameters] and no way we can implement the partial keyword search. Today I have spent time on it to solve this problem with the help of my colleague Durga and found a wonderful way. This is giving really wonderful result and doing wild card search even on very big document libraries fast. Below are the steps I followed to solve this. [I will post detailed post on it with screen shots and nice explanation soon in this blog.]

• Created an ASPX web part page in a SharePoint site.
• Added two web parts to the page. One is for content editor web part and another is for list view web part of a SharePoint library or list.
• Now, open the page in IE browser and add a text box, button to the content query web part.
• Written simple logic to button click event of the button and reload the page with the below formatted url. The url should be of the format

"you aspx page url?FilterName=FieldName&FilterMultiValue=*valuefromtextbox*".

• In above url, we are using two key value pairs to solve our problem.
• First one is FilterName: which is for in which field of the list view we need to search the value. For example the value may be Title, ID etc…
• Second one is the FilterMultiValue: Which is for what is the value we need to search. i.e. keyword. So, here you can pass multiple values too separated by semi-colon ';'.
• So, example url should like this
• http://mosssite/pages/listviewcustomwildcardsearch.aspx?FilterName=Title&FilterMultiValue=*prav* 
• Now the above url will search all the records in the given list view for the keyword "prav". So, wherever it exists in the given field name it will return all records.

Then how it is working?
Generally, If you research on query strings for a list view web part, it expects some query strings to filter and sort. I am SharePoint developer and got to know the two query strings which SharePoint list view web part uses for filtering. FilterName and FilterMultiValue. So, with that my research continued and tried long time with so many operators like %, single quotes, double quotes etc… in the value of the FilterMultiValue. Finally, I tried with * character before and end of the keyword, there I succeeded. Example: *prav* to FilterMultiValue.

• That’s it…. Working simply great.
• With that, You are done implementing the wild card search in a column in list view web part.

Happy by doing SharePoint customization. I know, this will solve so many problems to SharePoint dev’s.  Isn’t it? Please let me know if you have any questions, issues and write your valuable feedback and comments.

Will post more descriptive explanation of this post with screenshots soon in this blog. Follow me!!!