[Solved] Custom Filter (multiple contains)

[Aaron Hanusa]

Hi,

I need a custom filter so that the user can enter in a few different words that will perform a "contains" lookup on the entire string.  But by "contains", I don't mean the whole string.  Please take the following cell data as an example.  Below represents data from 2 cells for a detail column.

123 Main St. San Fransisco, CA, contact Joe
123 Main St. New York, NY, contact: Joe

So if the user enters "123 Joe", both of these records HAVE TO come up.

What is the best way to accomplish this?  It seems that I need to create a custom FilterDescriptor and make use of it in a custom filter control that implements IFilteringControl.  Am I on the right track?

Remember also that using the default FilterDescriptor, passing in FilterOperator.Contains to the constructor will NOT work.  I actually need to parse the user entered string (delimited by spaces), and perform a contains for each substring against each cell value.

So in the above example, I need to do a split against "123 Joe".  Then, I would check to see if one or both of those values is contained within the cells.

Thanks!

[Rossen Hristov]

Hi Aaron Hanusa,

The only way you can achieve this custom logic would be by developing your own custom filtering control like demonstrated in my blog post. In case the default FilterDescriptor does not suit your need you will have to implement the IFilterDescriptor interface and provide custom filtering logic.

I hope this helps.

Greetings,
Ross
the Telerik team

[Aaron Hanusa]

Thanks for the reply.  Do you have a sample of where you override IFilterDescriptor.CreateFilterExpression, and modify the expression passed in?

[Rossen Hristov]

Hello Aaron Hanusa,

Yes, my colleague Stefan Dobrev's blog post does this in the source code.

I hope this helps.

Sincerely yours,
Ross
the Telerik team

[Aaron Hanusa]

After downloading the code and viewing it, there are some helpful classes that facilitate converting the expression to a strongly typed expression, which is what I needed.

Thanks for your help!