django, solr and a few interesting stuff Part 2 : Haystack....

****continuation from the last story******

As the Adventure Continue

One of the nice thing about django, it have all sort of application. Haystack is such a application. Not just haystack support solr, it also support a few other backends. This include whoosh, and xapian.

The fun part about this, it is quite pleasant to work with. So we redo all of out previous code to work with this.

Let The Game Begin

Again the tutorial is helpful, it pretty much describe what i am have done anyway. And the documentation covers a lot!! So I will skip the setup, and index.

After following the tutorial to setup.And modify the search_indexes.py for each models that we need to find. And generate the solr index, and copy to the solr/conf.

We basically have a django application ready to do search. To test, is a matter of going to shell.

from haystack.query import  SearchQuerySet

q = SearchQuerySet().all()

of course, you can also, do

q = SearchQuerySet().filter(fieldname='value')
for i in q:
      print i.object.value

It is similar to django queryset api. Except it is for search. You can do a lot more, like faceted search, chain the filter, etc.

Are we There Yet. 

Not quite, there yet. Because haystack also have a search page, which you can enable, also covered in the tutorial. You can inherit from the search view, and forms to fit your need.

An example is for a form that I need(it is generic anyway)

	from haystack.forms import SearchForm
	from django import forms
	from haystack.query import SearchQuerySet
	SEARCH_FILTER =[('all','all'),('name','name'),('business','sector'),('address','address')]
	class FilterSearchForm(SearchForm):
	def __init__(self,*args,**kwargs):
	super(FilterSearchForm,self).__init__(*args,**kwargs)
	self.fields['keys'] = forms.ChoiceField(choices=SEARCH_FILTER,required=True,
	label='search in')
	def search(self):
	d = {}
	sqs = super(FilterSearchForm,self).search()
	key = str(self.cleaned_data['keys'])
	data = str(self.cleaned_data['q'])
	d[key] = data
	if key == 'all':
	return sqs
	else:
	print d
	return sqs.filter(**d)

view raw fieldsearch.py hosted with ❤ by GitHub

So you don''t even need to create your own form, and views.
Just import the views, and change the parameter

	from django.conf.urls.defaults import *
	from views import *
	from haystack.views import SearchView
	from haystack.forms import SearchForm
	from forms import FilterSearchForm
	urlpatterns = patterns('',
	(r'^$',SearchView(form_class=FilterSearchForm,
	load_all=False)),
	)

view raw sampleurls.py hosted with ❤ by GitHub

haystack is pretty comprehensive, have many stuff done for us, from views, forms that is functional. Doing indexing, generating index for solr, etc. I think this is a nice project to use in django for providing search in your web app