How do I create a stored procedure that will optionally search columns?

Question

I\'m working on an application for work that is going to query our employee database. The end users want the ability to search based on the standard name/department criteria

Answer 1

My first thought was to write a query something like this...

SELECT EmpId, NameLast, NameMiddle, NameFirst, DepartmentName
  FROM dbo.Employee
       INNER JOIN dbo.Department ON dbo.Employee.DeptId = dbo.Department.Id
 WHERE IdCrq IS NOT NULL
       AND
       (
          @bitSearchFirstName = 0
          OR
          Employee.NameFirst = @vchFirstName
       )
       AND
       (
          @bitSearchMiddleName = 0
          OR
          Employee.NameMiddle = @vchMiddleName
       )
       AND
       (
          @bitSearchFirstName = 0
          OR
          Employee.NameLast = @vchLastName
       )
       AND
       (
          @bitSearchDepartment = 0
          OR
          Department.Id = @intDeptID
       )

...which would then have the caller provide a bit flag if they want to search a particular field and then supply the value if they are to search for it, but I don't know if this is creating a sloppy WHERE clause or if I can get away with a CASE statement in the WHERE clause.

As you can see this particular code is in T-SQL, but I'll gladly look at some PL-SQL / MySQL code as well and adapt accordingly.