Field Comparison Operation

It is possible to specify that a comparison operation different from "=" (equality) must be used for a certain field in generating the query filter condition.

The equality operation (default) can be replaced with any of the following comparison operations:

=, >, >=, <, <=, starts with, contains.

The operation is determined by the field’s QueryOperation property, which is available in the Fields property page.

For string fields, you may find the starts with operation especially useful; it allows the user to enter only the beginning of a long name. Sometimes, it might be preferable to use the contains operation, meaning that the search value is contained somewhere in the string data value.

For numeric and date fields, it is often necessary to use inequality comparisons: less than (<), less than or equal (<=), greater than (>), greater than or equal (>=). These are especially useful when you need to enable your users to specify an interval of values. For more information, see Using multiple query fields for a single result field.