Hi Walter Thanks for the code lesson, i learnt alot! I do have one question before i implement this if you don't mind. If i followed your code example to add a StartsWith extension, would it be able to pass extra arguments for case insensitive query. (I tried, but got some parsing errors and then got lost in the code) here's an example of what i'm trying to achieve query = Contact.GetContactsList().AsQueryable().Where("@0.StartsWith(outerIt.Country, StringComparison.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase)", new List() { "austria", "poland" }); any help greatly appreciated. thanks Peter