Standard Salesforce searching looks for any occurrence of a supplied text value in all searchable fields of one or more sObject types. In the scenario where a user is interested in the occurrence of the text value in a particular field, this can lead to a number of unwanted results. For example, searching for an account whose name contains the text United will also retrieve all accounts with a mailing or billing address in the United Kingdom.
Form-based searching allows a user to specify the text that should be present in particular fields in order to be considered a match.
In this recipe, we will create a Visualforce page to allow a user to search for accounts that contain specified text in the Account Name or Website fields, or where the name entered in the Industry field matches one of a number of options.
This recipe makes use of a custom controller, so this will need to be created before the Visualforce page.