How to form an Endeca query where a field must start with certain letters

Question

Is it possible to form an Endeca query to retrieve a field that must start with certain letters? Say like get all users who's first letter is A? I checked with Range filters but it is supporting only numerical fields as well as Wild card search. But nothing worked well so far.

Answer 1

Creating a dimension is one way of approaching the problem as Paul Lemke mentioned.Wildcard is not an option since the performance overhead as well as irrelevant records. But we solved it using couple of other alternatives.

1. Create a new property for the Object called "StartWith", store the first letter of the Object and make it searchable. We found it easier than creating a Dimension.

There is a problem where letters like 'A' are usually stop words in Endeca. We can do you a couple of work around to solve this.

1. Get the ASCII value of the first letter and store the numerical value in to that property. One more advantage with this approach is that we can use Range Filters. But you can't search for 'AB' kind of requirements.
2. Pre-pend some characters like ^^^My name and search for ^^^M. The advantage with this approach is you can search conditions like letters starts with AB.