Question

I am having a difficult time getting autocomplete to work with haystack and Solr in a search form. Following the instructions here Auto-complete i was able to create my index in the following way.

class PersonIndex(indexes.RealTimeSearchIndex, indexes.Indexable):
    text = CharField(document=True, use_template=True)
    first_name = CharField(model_attr='first_name')
    last_name = CharField(model_attr='last_name')
    first_name_auto = indexes.EdgeNgramField(model_attr='first_name')


    def index_queryset(self):
        """Used when the entire index for model is updated."""
        return self.get_model().objects.all().order_by('first_name')

    def get_model(self):
        return Person

And with the way my URL route is set up, i dont have a view request that get directed to, the search method works.

url(r'^search/person/', search_view_factory(
    view_class=SearchView,
    template='index.html',
    form_class=ModelSearchForm
), name='haystack_search'),

The instructions say that we can perform the query in this fashion

from haystack.query import SearchQuerySet

sqs = SearchQuerySet().filter(content_auto=request.GET.get('q', ''))

but where do we put this SearchQuerySet, i am not sure what to override, how to modify my url to route correctly. My search currently works out of the box this way but i want to try auto complete with EdgeNgramField ?

Answer 1

You’ll need to define your own custom search form and tell it how to generate the SearchQuerySet it returns to the view, and then tell your search_view_factory to use that form instead of the ModelSearchForm.

Specify the way you want to generate the SearchQuerySet used by your view by overriding the ModelSearchForm search method:

from haystack.forms import ModelSearchForm

class AutocompleteModelSearchForm(ModelSearchForm):

    def search(self):
        if not self.is_valid():
            return self.no_query_found()
        if not self.cleaned_data.get('q')
            return self.no_query_found()
        sqs = self.searchqueryset.filter(first_name_auto=self.cleaned_data['q'])

        if self.load_all
            sqs = sqs.load_all()

        return sqs

This will now perform a filter on the form’s SearchQuerySet on the first_name_auto field rather than the auto_query that it would usually do on the text field (see haystack/forms.py to see what the original search function looks like).

You specify that you want to use this form in the argument list to your search_view_factory

from path.to.your.forms import AutocompleteModelSearchForm

url(r'^search/person/', search_view_factory(
    view_class=SearchView,
    template='index.html',
    form_class=AutocompleteModelSearchForm
 ), name='haystack_search'),