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

Question

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?

Answer 1

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; 

Answer 2

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.