Search with multiple fields

[dwees]

I have a form with essentially 5 different selects, let's call them country, state, subject area, tag, and age range. What I want to do is find all of the users who are the closest match to the search query (once I know how to do this, I can modify the query to find their names, email addresses etc...)

In the database, users have a country_id (not name!), state_id in one table, and subject area id, tag id, and age range id in another table (all in the same column as multiple rows for the same user).

I want to do a database search and match all of the users who meet at least 1 of the criteria, and sort them in order of closest match (all 5 criterion) to least match. Assuming I consider the order of preference to be subject area, tag, age range, country, and then state, how do I do this?

To make the problem even slightly more difficult, the form doesn't return the actual country name, it returns the row the country shows up in the country table (same for the other fields) so I'm currently doing a look up for each field to figure out which country/state/etc... I'm actually dealing with.

I don't see how I can do a FULLTEXT search for this information because it is all in different columns.

Anyone have a clue how to solve this complicated query?

[r937]

see this thread -- http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/show....php?p=1642882

assign each field that is matched a different weight, and then sort by combined weight descending

[chitwan]

In case the columns are fixed, you can search multiple columns for a given text using invert of an IN query, can see an example here
alltips.in/mysql-search-multiple-columns/
hope this helps...