Slick Postgres: How to search in a list of strings using the like operator - postgresql

Question

There is a simple database entity:
case class Foo(id: Option[UUID], keywords: Seq[String])
I want to implement a search function which returns all entities of type Foo which have at least one keyword that contains the search string.
I'm using Slick and tried this:
def searchKeywords(txt: String): Future[Seq[Foo]] = {
val action = Foos.filter(p => p.keywords.any like s"%$txt%").result
db.run(action)
}
This piece of code compiles, but when executing, I get this SQL error:
PSQLException: ERROR: syntax error at or near "any"
The generated sql statement looks like:
select "id", "title", "tagline", "logo", "short_desc", "keywords", "initial_condition", "work_process", "end_result", "ts", "lm", "v" from "projects" where any("keywords") like '%foo%'
And it does not work with postgresql. (I'm using v12)
Schema for the table looks like this:
CREATE TABLE foos
(
id UUID NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
keywords varchar[] NOT NULL
);
How can I achieve to search in a list of strings using the like operator?

Answer 1

From a pure SQL point of view, you need a derived table to achieve that. I hope some expert corrects me if I'm wrong but you can't use SQL operator like on a array.
Supposing your table construction is :
CREATE TABLE foos
(
id UUID NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
keywords varchar[] NOT NULL
);
Then an SQL way of retrieving the results would be :
select * from (
select id, unnest(keywords) as keyw from foos
) myTable where keyw like '%foo%'
Otherwise, the syntax you're using for the like operator seems correct.
myProperty like s"%$myVariable"