django icontains搜索postgres数据库

Question

I currently have a Django application and postgres database. I want to have a search bar that allows users to enter in a value and it will search some of the fields of the model to search for matching values. I want this to work even for values of "". I currently have:

MyModel.objects.filter(myfield__icontains=search_query).order_by(...)

How would I make this so that it can search multiple fields of the model at the same time. What is the most efficient way to do so? Is "icontains" okay for this?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

You can use Q to search multiple fields, for example:

fields that you want to search:

field0
field1
field2

Django search code:

from django.db.models import Q

search_result = MyModel.objects.filter(
    Q(field0_icontains=search_query) |
    Q(field1_icontains=search_query) |
    Q(field2_icontains=search_query)
).order_by(...)

Answer 2

Doing this through regular filter queries and icontains is not advisable as it becomes inefficient pretty quickly - you certainly don't want to be doing that on multiple large text fields.

However, PostgreSQL comes with a full text search engine which is designed for exactly this purpose. Django provides support for this .

You can define a SearchVector to perform full text search on multiple fields at once, eg, :

from django.contrib.postgres.search import SearchVector

MyModel.objects.annotate(
    search=SearchVector('field_1') + SearchVector('field_2'),
).filter(search='search_query')

The documentation I've linked to provides a lot of additional information on how to perform ranking etc. on search results.

Another alternative is to use a search engine like Elasticsearch - whether this is necessary depends on how many objects you have and what kind of filtering and ranking you need to do on results.