This is a shortcut for adding a text search for multiple values i.e.

[sql]

... WHERE [other conditions here] AND (name LIKE '%ABC%' OR name LIKE '%RET%' OR name LIKE '%Anything else%') ...

For a scenario where only the name field above is the only condition a single CDbCriteria instance will do i.e

$c1 = new CDbCriteria;

foreach ($search_values as $txt) { 
	$c1->compare('name', $txt, true, 'OR');
}

The problem is this will produce the following sql when searching with say a 'type' field too:

[sql]

... WHERE ((((type=1) OR (name LIKE '%ABC%')) OR (name LIKE '%RET%')) OR (name LIKE '%Anything else%')) ...

One solution is to ensure that your condition for the search on name appears first such that the sql produced will read

[sql]

... WHERE ((((name LIKE '%ABC%') OR (name LIKE '%RET%')) OR (name LIKE '%Anything else%')) AND (type=1)) ...

For cases where this isn't possible, another solution is to create another CDbCriteria instance to handle this specific condition and use CDbCriteria::mergeWith() to combine the two CDbCriteria instances as follows (thanks to Peter Jk's comment).

$c1 = new CDbCriteria; // original criteria
$c2 = new CDbCriteria; // criteria for handling our search values

foreach ($search_values as $txt) { 
	$c2->compare('name', $txt, true, 'OR');
}

$c1->mergeWith($c2); // Merge $c2 into $c1

You can also use CDbCriteria::addCondition() to manually add it to the original criteria as follows:

$c1 = new CDbCriteria; // original criteria
$c2 = new CDbCriteria; // criteria for handling our search values

foreach ($search_values as $txt) { 
	$c2->compare('name', $txt, true, 'OR');
}

$c1->addCondition($c2->condition);
$c1->params += $c2->params; // Add the params for $c2 into $c1