Visual Studio C#: how to construct a form to search Access table content?

Question

Let us say, I am building a window form application.

I have a parent form (MdiContainer), which has MenuStrip. One menu will open a child form.

The bottom portion of child form is DataGridView, which shows Access table User, the table includes fields: UserID, FirstName, LastName, Title, Department, Phone, etc. So that user can view the whole table.

Example #1: The top portion of child form is search function, which will be used to search an employee. I want to find phone number for employee John Miller, but I am not sure if the last name Miller is accurate, maybe I can just enter "john" in search textbox, which will return all records including "john".
Example #2: I also want to have combo box, which can filter DataGridView employees based on combo box value, e.g. I want to find all employees in sale department, then I can select Sale as combo box value for Department field.

So I have two questions:

1. In general, how is the idea? How to construct something for people to search an employee? Is DataGridView the right thing to use here?
2. How to make textbox search-able? How to link textbox to DataGridView? I would like to learn more about it, so where should I begin.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Hi VAer-4038,
You can search either FirstName or LastName with only one search textbox via following statement:

"select * from Name where FirstName like '" + txt_SearchName.Text+ "%' or LastName like '" + txt_SearchName.Text + "%'"  

And for question about filtering DataGridView employees based on combo box value, you can refer to the code below:

    private void comboBox1_SelectionChangeCommitted(object sender, EventArgs e)  
    {  
      
            (dataGridView1.DataSource as DataTable).DefaultView.RowFilter = string.Format("[Department] LIKE '%{0}%'", comboBox1.SelectedItem.ToString());  
     }  

Best Regards,
Daniel Zhang

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Answer 2

You can find many samples from Google :

How To Search Records In DataGridView Using C#
DataGridView Filter in C#
C# : How to Search Records in Access Database (DataGridView BindingSource Filter)
etc...