Filtering the Results

The Find method limits your search to the contents of one field. The Seek method requires that you have an index and has other limitations as well. If you need to search on multiple fields that are not the basis of an index or if your provider does not support indexes, you can limit your results using the Filter property of the Recordset object.

Use the Filter property to selectively screen out records in a Recordset object. The filtered Recordset becomes the current cursor, which means that records that do not satisfy the Filter criteria are not available in the Recordset until the Filter is removed. Other properties that return values based on the current cursor are affected, such as AbsolutePosition, AbsolutePage, RecordCount, and PageCount. This is because setting the Filter property to a specific value will move the current record to the first record that satisfies the new value.

The Filter property takes a variant argument. This value represents one of three methods for using the Filter property: a criteria string, a FilterGroupEnum constant, or an array of bookmarks. For more information, see Filtering with a Criteria String, Filtering with a Constant, and Filtering with Bookmarks.

Note   When you know the data you want to select, it is usually more efficient to open a Recordset with a SQL statement that effectively filters the result set, rather than relying on the Filter property.

To remove a filter from a Recordset, use the adFilterNone constant. Setting the Filter property to a zero-length string ("") has the same effect as using the adFilterNone constant.