Wagtail search is built on Django's QuerySet API. You should be able to search any Django QuerySet provided the model and the fields being filtered on have been added to the search index.
Wagtail provides a shortcut for searching pages: the .search() QuerySet method. You can call this on any PageQuerySet. For example:
# Search future EventPages
>>> from wagtail.core.models import EventPage
>>> EventPage.objects.filter(date__gt=timezone.now()).search("Hello world!")All other methods of PageQuerySet can be used with search(). For example:
# Search all live EventPages that are under the events index
>>> EventPage.objects.live().descendant_of(events_index).search("Event")
[<EventPage: Event 1>, <EventPage: Event 2>]Note
The search() method will convert your QuerySet into an instance of one of Wagtail's SearchResults classes (depending on backend). This means that you must perform filtering before calling search().
Wagtail's document and image models provide a search method on their QuerySets, just as pages do:
>>> from wagtail.images.models import Image
>>> Image.objects.filter(uploaded_by_user=user).search("Hello")
[<Image: Hello>, <Image: Hello world!>]Custom models <wagtailsearch_indexing_models> can be searched by using the search method on the search backend directly:
>>> from myapp.models import Book
>>> from wagtail.search.backends import get_search_backend
# Search books
>>> s = get_search_backend()
>>> s.search("Great", Book)
[<Book: Great Expectations>, <Book: The Great Gatsby>]You can also pass a QuerySet into the search method which allows you to add filters to your search results:
>>> from myapp.models import Book
>>> from wagtail.search.backends import get_search_backend
# Search books
>>> s = get_search_backend()
>>> s.search("Great", Book.objects.filter(published_date__year__lt=1900))
[<Book: Great Expectations>]By default, Wagtail will search all fields that have been indexed using index.SearchField.
This can be limited to a certain set of fields by using the fields keyword argument:
# Search just the title field
>>> EventPage.objects.search("Event", fields=["title"])
[<EventPage: Event 1>, <EventPage: Event 2>]Wagtail supports faceted search which is kind of filtering based on a taxonomy field (such as category or page type).
The .facet(field_name) method returns an OrderedDict. The keys are the IDs of the related objects that have been referenced by the field and the values are number of references to each ID. The results are ordered by number of references descending.
For example, to find the most common page types in the search results:
>>> Page.objects.search("Test").facet("content_type_id")
# Note: The keys correspond to the ID of a ContentType object, the values are the
# number of pages returned for that type
OrderedDict([
('2', 4), # 4 pages have content_type_id == 2
('1', 2), # 2 pages have content_type_id == 1
])The search operator specifies how search should behave when the user has typed in multiple search terms. There are two possible values:
- "or" - The results must match at least one term (default for Elasticsearch)
- "and" - The results must match all terms (default for database search)
Both operators have benefits and drawbacks. The "or" operator will return many more results but will likely contain a lot of results that aren't relevant. The "and" operator only returns results that contain all search terms, but require the user to be more precise with their query.
We recommend using the "or" operator when ordering by relevance and the "and" operator when ordering by anything else (note: the database backend doesn't currently support ordering by relevance).
Here's an example of using the operator keyword argument:
# The database contains a "Thing" model with the following items:
# - Hello world
# - Hello
# - World
# Search with the "or" operator
>>> s = get_search_backend()
>>> s.search("Hello world", Things, operator="or")
# All records returned as they all contain either "hello" or "world"
[<Thing: Hello World>, <Thing: Hello>, <Thing: World>]
# Search with the "and" operator
>>> s = get_search_backend()
>>> s.search("Hello world", Things, operator="and")
# Only "hello world" returned as that's the only item that contains both terms
[<Thing: Hello world>]For page, image and document models, the operator keyword argument is also supported on the QuerySet's search method:
>>> Page.objects.search("Hello world", operator="or")
# All pages containing either "hello" or "world" are returned
[<Page: Hello World>, <Page: Hello>, <Page: World>]By default, search results are ordered by relevance, if the backend supports it. To preserve the QuerySet's existing ordering, the order_by_relevance keyword argument needs to be set to False on the search() method.
For example:
# Get a list of events ordered by date
>>> EventPage.objects.order_by('date').search("Event", order_by_relevance=False)
# Events ordered by date
[<EventPage: Easter>, <EventPage: Halloween>, <EventPage: Christmas>]For each matched result, Elasticsearch calculates a "score", which is a number that represents how relevant the result is based on the user's query. The results are usually ordered based on the score.
There are some cases where having access to the score is useful (such as programmatically combining two queries for different models). You can add the score to each result by calling the .annotate_score(field) method on the SearchQuerySet.
For example:
>>> events = EventPage.objects.search("Event").annotate_score("_score")
>>> for event in events:
... print(event.title, event._score)
...
("Easter", 2.5),
("Haloween", 1.7),
("Christmas", 1.5),Note that the score itself is arbitrary and it is only useful for comparison of results for the same query.
Here's an example Django view that could be used to add a "search" page to your site:
# views.py
from django.shortcuts import render
from wagtail.core.models import Page
from wagtail.search.models import Query
def search(request):
# Search
search_query = request.GET.get('query', None)
if search_query:
search_results = Page.objects.live().search(search_query)
# Log the query so Wagtail can suggest promoted results
Query.get(search_query).add_hit()
else:
search_results = Page.objects.none()
# Render template
return render(request, 'search_results.html', {
'search_query': search_query,
'search_results': search_results,
})And here's a template to go with it:
{% extends "base.html" %}
{% load wagtailcore_tags %}
{% block title %}Search{% endblock %}
{% block content %}
<form action="{% url 'search' %}" method="get">
<input type="text" name="query" value="{{ search_query }}">
<input type="submit" value="Search">
</form>
{% if search_results %}
<ul>
{% for result in search_results %}
<li>
<h4><a href="{% pageurl result %}">{{ result }}</a></h4>
{% if result.search_description %}
{{ result.search_description|safe }}
{% endif %}
</li>
{% endfor %}
</ul>
{% elif search_query %}
No results found
{% else %}
Please type something into the search box
{% endif %}
{% endblock %}"Promoted search results" allow editors to explicitly link relevant content to search terms, so results pages can contain curated content in addition to results from the search engine.
This functionality is provided by the ~wagtail.contrib.search_promotions contrib module.