Search REST API with the User Profile Service and Hyphenated Last Names

Question

Using the Search REST API to get all users where their last name begins with a certain letter to make a custom user directory. For example, I hoped that the following would return all users that have a last name that starts with A:

/_api/search/query?querytext=%27lastname:A*%27&sourceid=%27B09A7990-05EA-4AF9-81EF-EDFAB16C4E31%27

However, that A* is really looking for words that start with A, not last names that start with A, so the above will return users with hyphenated last names where the second part starts with A. So the above will return "Carter-Adams" as part of the result set, which is not what I want.

How do I search to get values where the entire value starts with a certain string, rather than where any word in the value starts with that string?

Answer 1

If you are looking to grab the first letter of each last name you could use startsWith in your $filter of the query.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/fp142385(v=office.15).aspx#bk_supported

Answer 2

Try using lastname= instead of lastname:

Typically in the Search API a : means "Contains" and an = means "Equals" which will anchor the query to the beginning of the line. I'm not 100% certain it works in this specific case but give it a try and let me know.

Edit:

For reference, here's the KQL guide.

Depending on the architecture of your application you could always filter the results yourself, just holding them in a list until you prune the ones containing a hyphen.