w.holeso.me

Disclaimer:

This post was actually started about 9 months ago and never finished, so I’m not sure if the code will even run on the latest version of Django. I’m actually doing Ruby on Rails work nowadays at my job, and using Django solely for my personal projects. With that said, I hope some people out there will find some of these techniques somewhat useful.
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Search

One feature that is commonly used on a lot of Django applications is the ability to search through content by keywords.  There are many different ways to do this, but I’d like to present a way that’s super easy to implement and uses only the Django model API.

Before I start, I’d like to first give a little disclaimer: this is absolutely NOT the most efficient way to perform a search through data.  If you’re looking for a more advanced solution, check out djangosearch on google code.

Ok, let’s say you’re making a blogging application, and you need a way to search blog entries for certain keywords. You may have a model named BlogEntry that looks like this:

class BlogEntry(models.Model):
    blog = models.ForeignKey(Blog)
    subject = models.CharField(max_length=100)
    body = models.TextField()

Now let’s say you needed a way to search the ‘body’ and ‘subject’ fields of all BlogEntries for the keywords ‘Django’ and ‘Python.’ Given a set of BlogEntries, this function will search their subject and body fields for the specified keywords. Here’s how you would build the function:

def search_keywords(blogentries, keywords):
    '''
    Searches a given QuerySet and returns a
    QuerySet that contains any word in the list of keywords
    '''
    if isinstance(keywords, str):
        keywords = [keywords]

    if not isinstance(keywords, list):
        return None

    list_body_qs = [Q(body__icontains=x) for x in keywords]
    list_subj_qs = [Q(subject__icontains=x) for x in keywords]
    final_q = reduce(operator.or_, list_body_qs + list_subj_qs)
    r_qs = blogentries.filter(final_q)
    return r_qs

The beginning of the function is pretty straightforward. The interesting part is the latter half of the function, which uses Django’s database API and Python’s reduce function to dynamically create a Django query with all of the keywords in it.

First, build a couple lists of Q objects, one for each keyword and field.

...
list_body_qs = [Q(body__icontains=x) for x in keywords]
list_subj_qs = [Q(subject__icontains=x) for x in keywords]
---

Using Python’s reduce function, we glue all these Q objects together with operator.or_.

...
final_q = reduce(operator.or_, list_body_qs + list_subj_qs)
r_qs = blogentries.filter(final_q)
return r_qs
---

Essentially, you create a query similar to this:
Q(body__icontains=”dog”) | Q(body__icontains=”cat”) | Q(body__icontains=”parrot”) …

If you wanted to perform an all-inclusive search (i.e. AND’ing the search terms together instead of OR’ing them), you’d use operator.and_ instead of operator.or_

Finish

And that’s it. Just a few lines of code and you’ve got your own search function. Leave a comment with your thoughts (Unless you’re a spam bot)