currently standard odoo search field only support search exact term by query the target field using searchfield like %searchstring, normally there is no index field for such search, so the performance is not good, on the other hand it is not possible to search several key words at the same time like search engine do. fortunately there is community module fts base, as of now it is only available for version 7.0, and the full text searching function used a separate list view to do the search on all customized modules activated those full text searching function, it is a great feature to search all the indexed content in one place, but the most useful way of using full text search is embed such search ability in the corresponding view, for example when searching this forum, the full text search function should be available, otherwise, there will be more and more duplicated posts due to missing the full text search feature.
in this post, I would like to share how I managed to make the current FTS works for Odoo 8.0 and how to the extend forum module to enable it support full text search directly.
the proposed solution is far from perfect, currently workable on my windows 7 system, the further improvement is to fully integrate with ORM or make ORM natively support full text search by introducing new fulltext column type with relevant additional attribute, in base model and expression to handle the SQL command conversion for those special fulltext field. finally make ORM natrually support fulltext search !