Hi Daniel.
Welcome to the Ranch...
With regard to your question
In my assignment, i'm provided some smarts to the search functionality..for instance my search code is case in-sensitive
I agree with Jeroen - you're taking a risk here, but if you document you thoughts on the subject in the choices.txt you
probably would get away with this.
and will match a value if it starts with the value entered by the user.
I think this is an auto-fail. My spec says the server MUST perform a search where a record is returned if a field
String starts with the associated criteria String (what you are proposing), but my client-side spec states that only an EXACT match for the fields MUST be returned.
Many posts I've read on the Ranch believe that Sun have deliberately given you different search specs for client and server in order to see if you have read and understood the requirements.
I know it could be argued that you are helping out your users by providing better functionality, but I don't think it's worth deviating from the given specs (and if in doubt I usually think about what I do in the real world - here in a real project I wouldn't add functionality to a search algorithm/mechanism if the client had signed-off, but I probably would mention this as an possible addition)
Best wishes,
Daniel
[ August 16, 2006: Message edited by: Daniel Bryant ]