django-simple-search

By Mike Hostetler (mike@squarepegsystems.com)

I was looking for a portable, simple way to do search in a Django project. Sure, Haystack is nice, but it was overkill for what my need is. I needed something simple.

Googling around I found this blog post by Julien Phalip:

http://julienphalip.com/post/2825034077/adding-search-to-a-django-site-in-a-snap

And it seemed, in theory to work. So I took what he did and put it into a something to simply pop into your Django project and go.

The only thing this app really has is utils, which has all of Julien's functions in it. I did generized his view function to be . . . well, generic.

The generic_search function may be all need to do. Here is a real example:

   ### views.py
   from .utils import generic_search
   from books.models import Author,Book
   from django.shortcuts  import render_to_response,redirect
   
   QUERY="search-query"
   
   MODEL_MAP = { Author: ["first_name","last_name",],
                 Book  : ["title", "summary"],
   
   }
   
   def search(request):
   
   
       objects = []
   
       for model,fields in MODEL_MAP.iteritems():
   
           objects+=generic_search(request,model,fields,QUERY)
   
       return render_to_response("search_results.html",
                                 {"objects":objects,
                                  "search_string" : request.GET.get(QUERY,""),
                              }
       )

That should be it.

Look at the test cases for more examples.

Things that may or may not happen. Fork if willing to help out.

• use setuptools
• use PostgreSQL TSearch
• use MySQL FullText Search