Simple search in Django

Question

I have a really simple blog application and I want to add a really simple search feature to it.

There are 3 key fields to my model.

class BlogPost(models         


        

Answer 1

From the Django source:

# Apply keyword searches.
def construct_search(field_name):
    if field_name.startswith('^'):
        return "%s__istartswith" % field_name[1:]
    elif field_name.startswith('='):
        return "%s__iexact" % field_name[1:]
    elif field_name.startswith('@'):
        return "%s__search" % field_name[1:]
    else:
        return "%s__icontains" % field_name

if self.search_fields and self.query:
    for bit in self.query.split():
        or_queries = [models.Q(**{construct_search(str(field_name)): bit}) for field_name in self.search_fields]
        qs = qs.filter(reduce(operator.or_, or_queries))
    for field_name in self.search_fields:
        if '__' in field_name:
            qs = qs.distinct()
            break

Clearly, it uses the database options to perform search. If nothing else, you should be able to reuse some of the code from it.

So says the documentation too: http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/contrib/admin/#django.contrib.admin.ModelAdmin.search_fields

The full text search, however, uses the MySQL index (only if you are using MySQL).