Question

Using Pymongo for this scenario.

I have User that has email, first_name, last_name.

I am using this Pymongo snippet:

user_found = users.find({'$or':[
            {'email':{'$regex':searchString, '$options':'i'}},
            {'first_name':{'$regex':searchString, '$options':'i'}},
            {'last_name':{'$regex':searchString, '$options':'i'}}]})

this example works, if I want to find searchString in:

• email, or
• first_name, or
• last_name

now I need to also find searchString in first_name + last_name combined.

how can I do that?
Is there a way in mongo, through the query, to combine the two into a “fullname” then search the fullname?

Answer 1

Easiest way is to add an array field and populate it with all of the variants that you want to search on. Index that array field.

That way you only need one index and your search across all fields is simple and doesn’t change when you want to search on some new search variant. You can also normalize the text you put into the search array, for example, lower casing it, removing punctuation etc.

See https://stackoverflow.com/q/8206188/224370

Edit: MongoDB’s documentation now covers keyword search and the new full-text search feature.