Question

I have a few fields I’d like users to be searching across when looking for Restaurants on my site; cuisine_style (m2m), neighborhoods (m2m) and event_space (m2m).

These are presented to the user as dropdown boxes. In addition I’d also like to supply a text field where the user can type in anything and have it search against the restaurants name (CharField) and keywords (CharField).

I can write a view to display the results of ONE of these filters applied, but not all of them. Oh, and each dropdown would obviously have a null/empty default.

Any ideas? Here’s what I got to start with:

from django.db.models import Q
if request.GET.get('q'):
    search_terms = request.GET.get('q')
    restaurant_list = Restaurant.objects.filter(
        Q(name__icontains=search_terms) |
        Q(keywords__icontains=search_terms) |
    ).order_by('-user__date_joined')

but that only covers one field. what about all the dropdowns?

Oh(!) I guess i could compile ALL the GET parameters and split them up and dump them into a list, but not all values are single words.

I am also open to Haystack but I have no idea.

Answer 1

With post and field model form you can prepare a list of Q (named qs in sample) with posteds values:

from django.db.models import Q
if request.method == 'POST':

    qs = []
    if form.is_valid():
       cuisine_styles = form.cleaned_data['cuisine_style']
       neighborhoods  = form.cleaned_data['neighborhoods']
       search_terms = form.cleaned_data['search_terms']

       if cuisine_styles: qs.append( Q( cuisine_style__in = cuisine_styles ) )
       if neighborhoods: qs.append( Q(neighborhoods__in = neighborhoods ) )
       for s in search_terms.split(' '):
           qs.append(  Q( name__icontains=s) )
           qs.append(  Q( keywords__icontains=s) )

       f = None
       for q in qs:
           if f is None: f = q
           else: f |=q

        restaurant_list = Restaurant.objects.filter( f ).order_by('-user__date_joined')
        #show results ....
else:
    #show form ....

I assume that your dropdown boxes are ModelMultipleChoiceField.