Question

I am using haystack to perform a simple search query against my Person model for all the selected filter attributes. I have decide to try out the Faceted Search Form and created a generic TemplateView SearchView.

class SearchView(TemplateView):
    template_name = "index.html"
    results = EmptySearchQuerySet()
    form_class = FacetedSearchForm
    form = None
    query = ''
    selected_people = None

    def get(self, request, **kwargs):
        self.request = request
        self.query = self.get_query()
        if self.form.is_valid():
            self.results = self.get_results()
        context = self.get_context_data(request, **kwargs)

        if request.is_ajax() or request.GET.get('ajax'):
            self.template_name = 'search/Taleebo/search_results.html'

        return self.render_to_response(context)

    def get_query(self):
        return self.request.GET.get('q')

    def get_results(self):
        return self.form.search()

All the routing is working fine but when my get method is called it fails at the line

self.form.is_valid()

with an error that says NoneType' object has no attribute 'is_valid'

I am using the default form_class so shouldn’t that attribute be defined?

EDIT:

I am trying to now use the provided SearchView by haystack and the is_valid is no longer an issue but i am not getting any records back from ‘results’. I changed my urls.py to look like this

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

Answer 1

Using any class would result in the same error, when you don’t have an instance to access:

class SearchView(TemplateView):
(...)
      form = None  //<= Here you set the form to None

So you’re calling is_valid() on None, instead of on an actual form.