Question

I have a form that has a group of 13 checkboxes that together make up my search criteria… except that I also added a pair of radio buttons for ALL or ANY.

I was hoping to get away with something elegant like:

priority_ids = request.GET.getlist("priority")  # checkboxes
collection   = request.GET.get("collection")    # radio buttons
priorities = []
for priority_id in priority_ids:
    priorities.append(Q(focus__priority=priority_id))
if   (collection == "any"): qset = any(priorities)
elif (collection == "all"): qset = all(priorities)

However, any() and all() return a boolean, not a queryset that I can use in a filter. I want an “any” or “all” that does the equivalent of “Q(…) | Q(…) | Q(…)” or “Q(…) & Q(…) & Q(…)” for anywhere from 1 to 13 criteria.

Answer 1

There’s nothing that Django needs to do about that. You just need to combine your Q-s with & and respectively |, in a simple loop or in a more compact way with reduce.

And regarding terminology it seems to me that you are calling Q a queryset, but it’s not. It’s a filter on a queryset.
Something like the below should work:

priority_ids = request.GET.getlist("priority")
collection   = request.GET.get("collection")
priority_filters = []
for priority_id in priority_ids:
    priority_filters.append(Q(focus__priority=priority_id))

base_qs = SomeModel.objects.all()

if collection == "any":
   filtered_qset = base_qs.filter(reduce(operator.or_, priority_filters))
elif collection == "all":
   filtered_qset = base_qs.filter(reduce(operator.and_, priority_filters))