I finished building the search yesterday, before I heard these smart solutions.
The approach I took was as follows:
- Rather than using an auto-complete input, I used a regular input field with a RG showing the results because I needed to apply several filters.
- I created a 2nd input field whose value was dyamically set to be equal to the input field, but with all lowercase inputs. I then matched this to fields in our database using :lowercase within filtered / advanced so that the search was case insensitive.
- I set the search to be based on 3 fields and used the filtered / advanced option and saying the input should contain field x OR the input should contain field y, etc.
- Since this only matches when the input matches the full length of the field in our database, I added a parameter that would truncate the field in our database to be the # of letters that had been input in the search field. So, if they typed in “sc” that would match to “scott” since it’d compare only the first 2 letters.
Here’s a screenshot if it’s helpful:
