Filtering results based on a distinct column or field value - sql

Question

I have an MVC 3 application running against an MS SQL 2008 database with a table named Documents. Documents are broken down by paragraph in the database. The Documents table has a DocText column containing the text of each paragraph, a DocTitle column containing the document title. My MVC 3 app has a search function that can search for a word or phrase in the DocText column or in the DocTitle column. Everything works fine except that if a particular document has the search word appearing in multiple paragraphs, my List returns multiple instances of that document. For example, if the user searches the word "Budget" and one of THE documents has the word "budget" in four different paragraphs, my returned list has that document listed four times.
What I want to achieve is to list each document that has the searched word. I only want to list the document by Title once, regardless of the number of times the search word appears in that document. The only column that is truly unique is the RecordID column, a primary key.
My controller:
public class SearchController : Controller
{
private GUICEEntities4 db = new GUICEEntities4();
//
// GET: /Search/
public ActionResult Index(string Keyword)
{
#region Keyword Search
if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(Keyword)) {
var SearchDoc = db.Documents.Where(r => r.DocText.ToUpper().Contains(Keyword.ToUpper()) || r.Title.ToUpper().Contains(Keyword.ToUpper()) || r.DocNum.ToUpper().Contains(Keyword.ToUpper()));
ViewBag.CurrentKeyword = String.IsNullOrEmpty(Keyword) ? "" : Keyword;
return View(SearchDoc.ToList());
}
else{
return View();
}
#endregion
}
}
My View has the following:
#foreach (var item in Model) {
<tr>
<td>
<strong>AFI #Html.DisplayFor(modelItem => item.DocNum): #Html.DisplayFor(modelItem => item.Title)</strong>
<br />
#Html.DisplayFor(modelItem => item.DocSummary)
<br />
<span class="complianceitems">Number of compliance items:</span> (TBD)
</td>
<td>
<a href="/Documents/Index/#(Html.DisplayFor(modelItem => item.DocNum))">Checklist
Generator</a><br />
<a href="/UploadedDocs/#Html.DisplayFor(modelItem => item.DocFileName)" target="_blank">
Download PDF</a>
</td>
Any suggestions on how I can achieve my goal?
ADDED: Each document can be identified by the DocNum column which has a unique document number for that particular document. I've tried to iterate through the List to pull out each unqiue DocNum and then try to make that DocNum not appear again in the loop...but I was not successful.
The following SQL statement gives me the results I need. The statement assumes that the search word is "budget". I don't know how to get the same results using EF. Any suggestions?
SELECT DISTINCT DocNum, Title FROM Documents
WHERE
DocText LIKE '%budget%'
OR
Documents.Title LIKE '%budget%'
OR
DocNum LIKE '%budget%'

Answer 1

The issue here is in your EF query and not anything related to MVC. It's been a while since I've actively used EF but the simplest way would probably be to return just the RecordIds first.
var recordIds= db.Documents
.Where(r =>
r.DocText.ToUpper().Contains(Keyword.ToUpper()) ||
r.Title.ToUpper().Contains(Keyword.ToUpper()) ||
r.DocNum.ToUpper().Contains(Keyword.ToUpper()))
.Select(d => d.RecordId)
.Distinct();
I'm not exactly sure what you will do with each individual record from then on as there isn't enough information in your question. But this should help.
Update:
var foundDocs = new List<YourType>();
recordIds.ToList().ForEach(r => foundDocs.Add(db.TblDocLists.Single(l => l.TheDocNum == r)));
//I must point out that I'm not familiar with the latest versions of EF so this might be overkill.