One Search String/Multiple Fields

Dan, I don't think that I am being clear here (or I have completely misinterpreted what you are trying to say). The problem that I am trying to overcome right now is having to put each field into the statement on my results page. Currently the question of using AND or OR is not a big problem for me. What I DO want to do is pass the variable #paramSelect# which contains the values from each of the checked checkboxes from my search page. These values are the field names in my DB. When a user selects a checkbox, the value of that checkbox is being passed to my output via #paramSelect#, so if one checkbox is checked then I get #paramSelect# equal to field1. If two or more checkboxes are checked by the user then the value of #paramSelect# becomes a list of the values (i.e. field1,field3,field5) - this is the dynamic part that I am having trouble with. With your suggestion what I am doing is hard-coding each of the field values into my results page:

AND
(
form.field1 LIKE '%#String#%'
OR form.field2 ....
)
)

when what I want to do is have the values passed from the #paramSelect# variable, separated from the list, and dynamically inserted into the code. For example:

say that #paramSelect# is passed and contains the values field1,field3,field5
I would like to write a loop that will separate each value contained in #paramSelect#
i.e.(field1) (field3) (field5)
and then build the WHERE from these, allowing me to place something like my previous example:

<cfif FORM.paramSelect IS NOT ""></cfif>
WHERE 1=1
<cfloop list="#FORM.paramSelect#" delimiters="," index="i">
AND <cfqueryparam cfsqltype="cf_sql_varchar" value="'#i#'">
LIKE '%#FORM.String#%'
</cfloop>

The idea when I built that statement was that the values would be separated when the delimiter was reached (,) stored in the variable #i# and it would loop through the list contained within #paramSelect#. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be doing this because I get 0 records returned even when I search on just 1 field. My main reason for trying to do it this way is the fact that this DB is going to grow and the available fields are going to change. If I can store all of this in a variable and pass that to both the SELECT, WHERE, and a dynamic output table, then it relieves a lot of headaches and time going through and changing code in the future. Currently I have the dynamic SELECT and output tables built, but the WHERE part of the SQL statement is causing problems.

Thanks again for your input!

Dan, thank you for your reply, a couple of questions though: If I use the method that you are suggesting won't I be eliminating the capability of users to define which columns they want to search for the string in though? By looking at your code example it seems that I am telling SQL to search each column for '%#String#%', when I want it to search only the user-selected columns for '%#String#%' which will be different for each user. You are correct in the fact that I would like to change the ANDs to ORs, but my problem with this has been that my statement gets rejected when someone chooses say field3 and field4 to search on, resulting in a query looking like:

WHERE OR field3 LIKE '%#String#%' OR field4 LIKE '%#String#%'

which is causing an error because it should look like:

WHERE field3 LIKE '%#String#%' OR field4 LIKE '%#String#%'