Question

How can I query on the full name in Django?

To clarify, I essentially want to do create a temporary column, combining first_name and last_name to give a fullname, then do a LIKE on that, like so:

select [fields] from Users where CONCAT(first_name, ' ', last_name) LIKE '%John Smith%";

The above query would return all users named John Smith. If possible I’d like to avoid using a raw SQL call.

The model I’m talking about specifically is the stock django.contrib.auth.models User model. Making changes to the model directly isn’t a problem.

For example, if a user was to search for ‘John Paul Smith’, it should match users with a first name of ‘John Paul’ and last name ‘Smith’, as well as users with first name ‘John’ and last name ‘Paul Smith’.

Answer 1

Unless I’m missing something, you can use python to query your DB like so:

from django.contrib.auth.models import User
x = User.objects.filter(first_name='John', last_name='Smith') 

Edit:
To answer your question:

If you need to return ‘John Paul Smith’ when the user searches for ‘John Smith’ then you can use ‘contains‘ which translates into a SQL LIKE. If you just need the capacity to store the name ‘John Paul’ put both names in the first_name column.

User.objects.filter(first_name__contains='John', last_name__contains='Smith') 

This translates to:

SELECT * FROM USERS
WHERE first_name LIKE'%John%' 
AND last_name LIKE'%Smith%'