Question

Setting up a search page with Django Haystack involves putting in their URLconf snippet url(r'^search/', include('haystack.urls')). However, this means (at least from my extremely basic understanding of Django/MVC), that there is no simple way to pass extra context (i.e. an extra dictionary key/value) to be rendered onto the page.

In particular, I want to customize a search field to mirror the variable passed onto the page from a GET request:

<form method="get" action=".">
<input type="text" name="q" value="">
<!-- result html here -->
</form>

Say the parameter ?q=twitter is attached to the URL as part of a GET request; I’d like to make the value selector equal to twitter. If I had control of the view, I would likely do it something like this:

if request.method == 'GET':
    q = request.GET['q']
    return render(request, 'template.html', {'q': q})

And then use q as the value for the value selector in the HTML <input>.

Is there any way to accomplish this in a simple manner, besides editing the Haystack source?

Answer 1

Accomplished this using a custom context processor:

from django.template import RequestContext
from django.http import HttpResponse

def get_search_query(request):
    search_query = request.GET.get('q', '')
    print search_query
    return {
        'search_query':search_query
    }

Then, simply call {{ search_query }} in any of your HTML templates.