Question

I have troubles using the search_fields when the search expression has multiple words and i want to perform a startswith search

I have a class

class Foo(models.Model):
  kw = models.CharField(max_length = 255)
  ...

class FooAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
  search_fields = ('^kw',)

The '^' indicates that i want to perform a startswith search. If i’m looking for the kw ‘foo fuu’, django will perform the query:

select * from app_foo where `foo`.`kw` like 'foo%' and `foo`.`kw` like 'fuu%' 

This query obviously gives zero results. What should i do to make the engine looking for 'foo fuu%' ?

Answer 1

How about override self.query so split() doesn’t work?

from django.contrib.admin.views.main import ChangeList


class UnsplitableUnicode(str):
    "An object that behaves like a unicode string but cannot be split()"
    def split(self, *args, **kwargs):
        return [self]

class MultiWordSearchChangeList(ChangeList):
    "Changelist that allows searches to contain spaces"
    def get_query_set(self, request):
        self.query = UnsplitableUnicode(self.query)
        return super(MultiWordSearchChangeList, self).get_query_set(request)

class FooAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    def get_changelist(self, request, **kwargs):
        return MultiWordSearchChangeList