Django simple search provides the same functionality and convenience that search_fields does in the django admin.

See http://gregbrown.co.nz/code/django-simple-search/ for more details.

Installation

pip install django-simple-search

Or download the source from https://pypi.python.org/pypi/django-simple-search/

Django 1.8 or higher is required.

Quick start

from simple_search import search_filter
from .models import MyModel

query = 'test'
search_fields = ['^title', 'description', '=id']
f = search_filter(search_fields, query)
filtered = MyModel.objects.filter(f)

For convenience you can create a search form class via the provided factory:

from .models import MyModel
from simple_search import search_form_factory

SearchForm = search_form_factory(MyModel.objects.all(),
                                 ['^title', 'description'])

Reference

simple_search.search_filter(search_fields, query)

Given a list of search_fields to search on and a query, return a models.Q object which can be used to filter a queryset.

search_fields behaves exactly like the django admin search_fields option. Example:

search_fields = [
    # match from the start of the title field
    '^title',

    # match anywhere within the description field
    'description',

    # match from the start of the related category's title field
    '^category__title',

    # exact match on object id
    '=id'
]

simple_search.search_form_factory(queryset, search_fields)

Create a search form class which will filter queryset according to search_fields and the form field q. Example:

# forms.py
from .models import MyModel
from simple_search import search_form_factory

SearchForm = search_form_factory(MyModel.objects.all(),
                                 ['^title', 'description'])

# views.py
from django.shortcuts import render
from .forms import SearchForm

@render('search.html')
def search(request):
    form = SearchForm(request.GET or {})
    if form.is_valid():
        results = form.get_queryset()
    else:
        results = MyModel.objects.none()

    return {
        'form': form,
        'results': results,
    }

Running tests

Use tox (https://pypi.python.org/pypi/tox):

pip install tox
cd path-to/django-simple-search
tox