Aaron Bertrand discusses procedures which satisfy all potential search conditions:
This table has a lot of columns, obviously. Now envision an interface where employees at World Wide Importers could perform searches for specific customers. They may want to perform different searches based on unique combinations of criteria, including (and this is not an exhaustive list by any means, but enough for my purposes today):
- CustomerID (e.g. pick the customer from a list);
- actual “bill to” CustomerID;
- name;
- category;
- buying group;
- when the account was opened;
- city; or,
- whether the account is on credit hold.
And any combination of the above. I know you’ve seen and probably built interfaces like this before, but just as a quick mockup, the employees would have a screen something like this:
There are plenty of ways to solve this problem, and Aaron shows a couple methods (including one which has major problems).