How to do partial beginning matches

[Felix Pendergast]

Hello,

I'm trying to search for partial beginning matches on a big list of
lastnames. So Wein* should find Weinberg, Weinkamm etc.

I could do this by creating a special field, and adding
  <filter class="solr.EdgeNGramFilterFactory" minGramSize="1"
maxGramSize="50" preserveOriginal="1"/>
to its type specification in schema.xml. When I add the line above only to
the indexing analyzer and leave it empty for the query analyzer, I can then
search by just search special_field:Wein and get the expected results.

Now I see that solr also has a *-syntax. What's the connection between
EdgeNGramFilterFactory and the *-syntax?

Am I doing things correctly or is there a better, more regular way?

Thanks,
Felix