In the webclient, the search field for a many2one field provides a combobox with names of discrete resources, as well as a selection icon to select a discrete resource in a popup window. At the same time, the search field does allow the user not to select a discrete resource but leave his raw input as a search criterium. The latter implies a substring search, which is indeed the case. The former case, in which the user does select a single resource as a search criterium strongly implies a search on a uniqe resource. However, in this case the performed search is a substring search as well.
Example:
In my database, I search for partners in the Netherlands. Once I start to type something like 'Nethe', the combobox offers me the choice between Netherlands and Netherlands Antilles. If I select 'Netherlands' from the dropdown options or select this resource through the selection icon, I would expect the resulting partners all to reside in this country, but instead I get partners in the Netherlands Antilles as well, because Netherlands is a substring of Netherlands Antilles.
Checked against openobject-client-web/6.0 revision 4567
This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 748238 because of a misunderstanding. The misunderstanding is that the many2one search widget of the webclient applies the '=' operator. It does apply the 'like' operator instead.
Even more so,applying the '=' operator would still be a rather sloppy solution for the behaviour I observed and in order to solve this problem properly the webclient should search for the actual id instead of a string.