Is it possible to use Full Text Search (FTS) with LINQ?

Augusto_Radtke_18623 0
Viewed 23584

I wonder if is possible to use FTS with LINQ using .NET Framework 3.5. I'm searching around the documentation that I didn't find anything useful yet.

Does anyone have any experience on this?

full-text-search sql-server linq
6 Answers

Yes. However you have to create SQL server function first and call that as by default LINQ will use a like.

This blog post which will explain the detail but this is the extract:

To get it working you need to create a table valued function that does nothing more than a CONTAINSTABLE query based on the keywords you pass in,

create function udf_sessionSearch
      (@keywords nvarchar(4000))
returns table
as
  return (select [SessionId],[rank]
            from containstable(Session,(description,title),@keywords))

You then add this function to your LINQ 2 SQL model and he presto you can now write queries like.

    var sessList = from s   in DB.Sessions
                   join fts in DB.udf_sessionSearch(SearchText) 
                   on s.sessionId equals fts.SessionId
                 select s;
user_330

No. Full text search is not supported by LINQ To SQL.

That said, you can use a stored procedure that utilizes FTS and have the LINQ To SQL query pull data from that.

Gabriel_Isenberg_14734930

I don't believe so. You can use 'contains' on a field, but it only generates a LIKE query. If you want to use full text I would recommend using a stored proc to do the query then pass it back to LINQ

Glenn_Slaven_29750

No, full text searching is something very specific to sql server (in which text is indexed by words, and queries hit this index versus traversing a character array). Linq does not support this, any .Contains() calls will hit the un-managed string functions but will not benefit from indexing.

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