Question

I have two models: Director, and Film.

I want to create a web query form so that a user can search something like “All films from director ‘Steven Spielberg’ between 1990 and 1998”.

Just curious what the best and simplest way to do this would be?

Thanks,

Answer 1

OK the simplest solution is something like that.

I make some assumptions about the structure of your models, so
adjust accordingly.

Let’s say this is our models.py

from django.db import models

class Director(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=128)
    # maybe some other fields...

class Film(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=128)
    director = models.ForeignKey(Director)
    created_at = models.DateField()

Our naive views.py
Please keep in mind that I deliberately omit many sanity checks.

import datetime
from django.shortcuts import render_to_response
from myapp.models import Film

def search(request):
    # Suppose we support these params -> ('director', 'fromdate', 'todate')
    request_params = request.GET.copy()
    fromdate = datetime.datetime.strptime(request_params['fromdate'], 'some-string-format')
    todate = datetime.datetime.strptime(request_params['todate'], 'some-string-format')
    # Our query is ready to take off.
    film_results = Film.objects.filter(
        director__name=request_params['director'],
        created_at__range=(fromdate, todate)
    )
    return render_to_response('search_results.html', {'results':film_results})

Our search_results.html template

{% extends some_base.html %}
{% if results }
  {% for film in results %}
    <h3>{{ film.title }}</h3>
    <p>Director: {{ film.director.name }}</p>
    <p>When: {{ film.created_at }}</p>
  {% endfor %}
{% else %}
  <p>Sorry no results for your query</p>
{% endif %}

Also read this on creating datetime objects from string

Edit: Oh I forgot about the urls.py and the actual form 🙂

in your url.py add something like this inside the urlpatterns.

url(r'^search/$', 'myapp.views.search'),

Now the actual search form must be something like this:

<form method='GET', action='/search/'>
... your fields
</form>

You can generate it through a django form if you wish.
Anyway this is not going to get you far I guess. If you are doing
anything serious you might take a look into haystack