django-autocomplete-search

django-autocomplete-search enables you to create a site wide search that will autocomplete based off specified models and fields. If no option from the autocomplete list is selected a normal text search will be performed. If one of the autocomplete suggestions is selected the objects for the model that have the exact matching field will be returned.

Install

Currently we don't have a proper bundle for this so to install it check out the project and from the project root run:

$> nvm install
$> npm install
$> npm run build
$> python setup.py install

django-autocomplete-search runs on top of django-haystack so you will need to setup your indexes according to their docs. Additionally you will need to install the python bindings for your chosen backend. For example if you are using elastic search you will need to run:

$> pip install elasticsearch

Once you have the app installed into your environment you will need to add it to your INSALLED_APPS:

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    # django core apps

    'haystack',
    'autocomplete_search',

    # project apps
)

And add the css and javascript into your template:

<link href="{% static 'autocomplete_search/dist/autocomplete-search.css' %}" rel="stylesheet">
<script src="{% static 'autocomplete_search/dist/autocomplete-search.js' %}"></script>

You should also add the AUTCOMPLETE_DOCUMENT_FIELD setting to your settings.py, this determines which field is used for the document search. If no field is set the setting defaults to content.

django 1.9

Currently django-haystack does not support django 1.9 so this only supports 1.8 and lower. The latest development version of django-haystack has fixed some issues with 1.9 so installing that may allow you to install this with django 1.9.

Usage

Using django-autocomplete-search is simple, just create a view inheriting from SearchView and supply a search_url and autocomplete_fields:

from django.core.urlresolvers import reverse_lazy
from autocomplete_search import views

from myapp import models


class SearchModelA(views.SearchView):
    search_url = reverse_lazy('model_a_search')
    autocomplete_fields = {
        models.ModelA: ['name'],
    }

The search_url should be the url the view is registered to. This is the url used to fetch the autocomplete suggestions from and the final search url.

The autocomplete_fields is used to specify the models and fields to use for suggestions. This is a dictionary of model classes to an iterable of field names. In the above example sugestions will be created for ModelA based on the field name.

In addition the following fields can be set:

• template_name - The template to use to render the searhc results (default: search/indexes/search.html)
• autocomplete_limit - The maximum number of suggestions to return, if None no limit is imposed (default: None)
• lookup - The lookup to use for finding suggestions (default: icontains)
• form_class - The class to use for runnung the search (default: AutocompleteSearchForm)

To use a search form on a non search results page add a AutocompleteSearchForm instance to the context instantiated with the required search url as the url parameter.