Custom Module - Search - "Starts With" wildcard

Is there a way to do a “starts with” wildcard search/filter in a custom module?

I’m trying to replicate a BC Site. In BC I had to put each webapp item in a category “a”, “b”, …, then search by that category. Just hoping to find a more efficient way.

No, not via the server search or component filtering. But if you have under, say, 500 items then perhaps a front-end javascript filtering method could work (so you’d load all items in the background and filter with javascript).

@shannonlynd Check this out: https://datatables.net/

Tim - have you used it with large datasets? My custom module already has 1500 records, and will definitely grow.

@shannonlynd I think that would be to much loading time, but it depends on how complex the module is, so I’m not sure. @Adam.Wilson wrote someting about 500 as a limit, though this is not a technical problem anymore as it was in BC, 1500 item might take a while to load on the page and I don’t know the impact on browser speed as all of the sorting, pagination etc is done in JS on the client side.
That being said I think it’s worth experimenting with it.