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

You would use the __search operator. It's documented in the Django QuerySet API Reference. There's also istartswith, which does a case-insensitive starts-with search.

Here's a working example (adapted from my own Django site):

def search(request):
    try:
        q = request.GET['q']
        posts = BlogPost.objects.filter(title__search=q) | \
                BlogPost.objects.filter(intro__search=q) | \
                BlogPost.objects.filter(content__search=q)
        return render_to_response('search/results.html', {'posts':posts, 'q':q})
    except KeyError:
        return render_to_response('search/results.html')

Note that __search is only available in MySQL and requires direct manipulation of the database to add the full-text index. See the MySQL documentation for additional details.