Umbraco Web Api with Examine Lucene question

Questions
1

Hello everyone,
I am a newbie with Examine and Lucene.
I wanted to use them to query the cache instead of hitting the database.
It works! The search are performing well and quickly.
The only problem that I have is to build queries.

I want to focus my search on a specific ‘nodeTypealias’ and get all the ‘nodeNames’ connected. That was not particularly difficult. The problem started when I wanted to apply another filter to this selection and get only ‘nodeName’ starting with letter ‘a’ or ‘b’.

This is my Web APi code:

public class PeopleApiController : UmbracoApiController
    {
       
       

        public IEnumerable<SearchResult> GetPeople(string letter = "") {

            

            var Searcher = ExamineManager.Instance.SearchProviderCollection["ExternalSearcher"];
            var searchCriteria = Searcher.CreateSearchCriteria(BooleanOperation.Or);
            var q = "nodeTypeAlias:PeopleDetails";
            var query = searchCriteria.RawQuery(q);
           
           
            IEnumerable<SearchResult> results = Searcher.Search(query);
                      
            return results;
        }

    }

How could I combine the part with wildcards like :

“nodeName:” + letter + “?”;

I tried also to do something like:

public IEnumerable<SearchResult> GetPeople(string letter = "") {

            var Searcher = ExamineManager.Instance.SearchProviderCollection["ExternalSearcher"];
            var searchCriteria = Searcher.CreateSearchCriteria("content");
            var query = searchCriteria.NodeTypeAlias("PeopleDetails").And().NodeName(letter + "?").Compile();
           
            IEnumerable<SearchResult> results = Searcher.Search(query);
                      
            return results;
        }
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://our.umbraco.com/forum/73811-umbraco-web-api-with-examine-lucene-question