FYI - the original thread can be found here
http://msdn.microsoft.com/newsgroups/default.aspx?dg=microsoft.public.sqlserver.
programming&mid=b965bf2b-ce05-4ad2-baee-47205465946b

As I understand it, he OP was trying to find out how to combine a negative
FTI search (using CONTAINS) with additional restrictions in the WHERE caluse.
I suggested building the condition using NOT(CONTAINS()).


ML

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Matija Lah, SQL Server MVP
http://milambda.blogspot.com/

Thanks Hilary...

I guess I confused the issue by mentioning the Date comparison in my post.
The crux of the matter was whether I could use JUST exclusions in the
Contains clause.  For example...

contains((description),'(!"cow" &! "bull")')

The idea being that any record is acceptable, as long as the 'description'
field does NOT contain either "cow" OR "bull"

In your syntax I guess that would translate into
contains((description), 'NOT ( "cow" AND "bull")').

Someone in the SQLServer.Programming group suggested:

where NOT(contains((description),'"cow" OR "bull"'))
   and <the rest of the conditions>

That seems to work well, and now I use it whenever the program sees that
there were no keywords entered into any of the text boxes for  each of the
conditions "With ALL of the Words:" or "With at Least ONE of the Words:",
and the user has placed entries only in "With NONE of the Words:".

My code now becomes (when only exclusions are entered):

Where NOT (contains((description),'("cow" | "bull")') OR
contains((long_name),'("cow" | "bull")') )
AND ( list_date > '10/01/2007')

Note here that the date comparison is completely separated from the Contains
clause, as you have indicated.

However, I have noticed that you use the * in your contains example, whereas
I am creating a "contains" for each Full Text Indexed field being queried.

Does this mean I can consolidate the query I am using with * instead of
querying each field separately? In my Text Catalog, only the 2 fields
"description" and "long_name" are indexed.

Thanks again...