I'm building an advanced search page for a scientific database using Django. The goal is to be able to allow some dynamically created sophisticated searches, joining groups of search terms with and & or.
I got part-way there by following this example, which allows multiple terms anded together. It's basically a single group of search terms, dynamically created, that I can either and-together or or-together. E.g.
<field1|field2> <is|is not|contains|doesn't contain> <search term> <->
<+>
...where <-> will remove a search term row and <+> will add a new row.
But I would like the user to be able to either add another search term row, or add an and-group and an or-group, so that I'd have something like:
<and-group|or-group> <->
<field1|field2> <is|is not|contains|doesn't contain> <search term> <->
<+term|+and-group|_or-group>
A user could then add terms or groups. The result search might end up like:
and-group
compound is lysine
or-group
tissue is brain
tissue is spleen
feeding status is not fasted
Thus the resulting filter would be like the following.
Data.objects.filter(Q(compound="lysine") & (Q(tissue=brain) | Q(tissue="spleen")) & ~Q(feeding_status="fasted"))
Note - I'm not necessarily asking how to get the filter expression below correct - it's just the dynamic hierarchical construction component that I'm trying to figure out. Please excuse me if I got the Q and/or filter syntax wrong. I've made these queries before, but I'm still new to Django, so getting it right off the top of my head here is pretty much guaranteed to be zero-chance. I also skipped the model relationships I spanned here, so let's assume these are all fields in the same model, for simplicity.
I'm not sure how I would dynamically add parentheses to the filter expression, but my current code could easily join individual Q expressions with and or or.
I'm also not sure how I could dynamically create a hierarchal form to create the sub-groups. I'm guessing any such solution would have to be a hack and that there are not established mechanisms for doing something like this...
Here's a screenshot example of what I've currently got working:
UPDATE:
I got really far following this example I found. I forked that fiddle and got this proof of concept working before incorporating it into my Django project:
http://jsfiddle.net/hepcat72/d42k38j1/18/
The console spits out exactly the object I want. And there are no errors. Clicking the search button works for form validation. Any fields I leave empty causes a prompt to fill in the field. Here's a demo gif:
Now I need to process the POST input to construct the query (which I think I can handle) and restore the form above the results - which I'm not quite sure how to accomplish - perhaps a recursive function in a custom tag?
Although, is there a way to snapshot the form and restore it when the results load below it? Or maybe have the results load in a different frame?
I don't know if I'm teaching a grandmother to suck eggs, but in case not, one of the features of the Python language may be useful.
foo( bar = 27, baz = None)
can instead be coded
args = {}
a1, a2 = 'bar', 'baz'
d[a1] = 27
d[a2] = None
foo( **args )
so an arbitrary Q object specified by runtime keys and values can be constructed q1 = Q(**args)
IIRC q1 & q2 and q1 | q2 are themselves Q objects so you can build up a filter of arbitrary complexity.
I'll also include a mention of Django-filter which is usually my answer to filtering questions like this one, but I suspect in this case you are after greater power than it easily provides. Basically, it will "and" together a list of filter conditions specified by the user. The built-in ones are simple .filter( key=value), but by adding code you can create custom filters with complex Q expressions related to a user-supplied value.
As for the forms, a Django form is a linear construct, and a formset is a list of similar forms. I think I might resort to JavaScript to build some sort of tree representing a complex query in the browser, and have the submit button encode it as JSON and return it through a single text field (or just pick it out of request.POST without using a form). There may be some Javascript out there already written to do this, but I'm not aware of it. You'd need to be sure that malicious submission of field names and values you weren't expecting doesn't result in security issues. For a pure filtering operation, this basically amounts to being sure that the user is entitled to get all data in database table in any case.
There's a form JSONField in the Django PostgreSQL extensions, which validates that user-supplied (or Javascript-generated) text is indeed JSON, and supplies it to you as Python dicts and lists.
Related
I have a preference model in my Django app, and I am trying to write a query that filters to items that have two preferences set in a certain way. The preferences are stored many-to-many, so each object has multiple preferences linked to it.
For preference 1, I can check with:
Team.objects.filter(teampreferencemodel__name='remind_morning', teampreferencemodel__raw_value='a')
For preference 2, I can check with:
Team.objects.filter(teampreferencemodel__name='remind_days_before', teampreferencemodel__raw_value='5')
My goal is to get the intersection of those two queries. I thought I could do something like:
Team.objects.filter(Q(teampreferencemodel__name='remind_morning', teampreferencemodel__raw_value='a')),
Q(teampreferencemodel__name='remind_days_before', teampreferencemodel__raw_value='5'))
but it appears (I think) that Django is trying to satisfy both Qs with the same teampreferencemodel, rather than finding one that has one of each.
Is there any way to optimize this query, via Q or something else, or do I need to just resort to:
Team.objects.filter(teampreferencemodel__name='remind_morning', teampreferencemodel__raw_value='a').intersection(
Team.objects.filter(teampreferencemodel__name='remind_days_before', teampreferencemodel__raw_value='5'))
or slightly better:
Team.objects.filter(teampreferencemodel__name='remind_morning', teampreferencemodel__raw_value='a').filter(
teampreferencemodel__name='remind_days_before', teampreferencemodel__raw_value='5'))
It just feels like there should be a better way...
I am writing a simple app in django that searches for records in database.
Users inputs a name in the search field and that query is used to filter records using a particular field like -
Result = Users.objects.filter(name__icontains=query_from_searchbox)
E.g. -
Database consists of names- Shiv, Shivam, Shivendra, Kashiva, Varun... etc.
A search query 'shiv' returns records in following order-
Kahiva, Shivam, Shiv and Shivendra
Ordered by primary key.
My question is how can i achieve the order -
Shiv, Shivam, Shivendra and Kashiva.
I mean the most relevant first then lesser relevant result.
It's not possible to do that with standard Django as that type of thing is outside the scope & specific to a search app.
When you're interacting with the ORM consider what you're actually doing with the database - it's all just SQL queries.
If you wanted to rearrange the results you'd have to manipulate the queryset, check exact matches, then use regular expressions to check for partial matches.
Search isn't really the kind of thing that is best suited to the ORM however, so you may which to consider looking at specific search applications. They will usually maintain an index, which avoids database hits and may also offer a percentage match ordering like you're looking for.
A good place to start may be with Haystack
This question already has answers here:
Django: __in query lookup doesn't maintain the order in queryset
(6 answers)
Closed 8 years ago.
I've searched online and could only find one blog that seemed like a hackish attempt to keep the order of a query list. I was hoping to query using the ORM with a list of strings, but doing it that way does not keep the order of the list.
From what I understand bulk_query only works if you have the id's of the items you want to query.
Can anybody recommend an ideal way of querying by a list of strings and making sure the objects are kept in their proper order?
So in a perfect world I would be able to query a set of objects by doing something like this...
Entry.objects.filter(id__in=['list', 'of', 'strings'])
However, they do not keep order, so string could be before list etc...
The only work around I see, and I may just be tired or this may be perfectly acceptable I'm not sure is doing this...
for i in listOfStrings:
object = Object.objects.get(title=str(i))
myIterableCorrectOrderedList.append(object)
Thank you,
The problem with your solution is that it does a separate database query for each item.
This answer gives the right solution if you're using ids: use in_bulk to create a map between ids and items, and then reorder them as you wish.
If you're not using ids, you can just create the mapping yourself:
values = ['list', 'of', 'strings']
# one database query
entries = Entry.objects.filter(field__in=values)
# one trip through the list to create the mapping
entry_map = {entry.field: entry for entry in entries}
# one more trip through the list to build the ordered entries
ordered_entries = [entry_map[value] for value in values]
(You could save yourself a line by using index, as in this example, but since index is O(n) the performance will not be good for long lists.)
Remember that ultimately this is all done to a database; these operations get translated down to SQL somewhere.
Your Django query loosely translated into SQL would be something like:
SELECT * FROM entry_table e WHERE e.title IN ("list", "of", "strings");
So, in a way, your question is equivalent to asking how to ORDER BY the order something was specified in a WHERE clause. (Needless to say, I hope, this is a confusing request to write in SQL -- NOT the way it was designed to be used.)
You can do this in a couple of ways, as documented in some other answers on StackOverflow [1] [2]. However, as you can see, both rely on adding (temporary) information to the database in order to sort the selection.
Really, this should suggest the correct answer: the information you are sorting on should be in your database. Or, back in high-level Django-land, it should be in your models. Consider revising your models to save a timestamp or an ordering when the user adds favorites, if that's what you want to preserve.
Otherwise, you're stuck with one of the solutions that either grabs the unordered data from the db then "fixes" it in Python, or constructing your own SQL query and implementing your own ugly hack from one of the solutions I linked (don't do this).
tl;dr The "right" answer is to keep the sort order in the database; the "quick fix" is to massage the unsorted data from the database to your liking in Python.
EDIT: Apparently MySQL has some weird feature that will let you do this, if that happens to be your backend.
So, my problem is this. I have a legacy MySQL database that I'm building a shiny new Django application over. For whatever reason, some fairly daft design decisions were made—such as all fields, no matter what they contain, being stored as varchars—but because since other systems that I'm not rewriting depend on that same data I can't destructively change that schema at all.
I want to treat a certain field—the stock quantity on hand—as an integer, so that in my template I can check its amount and display a relevant value (basically, if there are more than 100 items available, I want to just display "100+ Available").
The existing value for stock quantity is stored as, oddly, a varchar holding a float (as if it's possible to have fractional amounts of an item in stock):
item.qty: u"72.0"
Now, I figure as a worst case I can use QuerySet.values(), and iterate over the results, replacing each stock quantity with an int() parsed version of itself. Something like ...
item_list = items.values()
for item in item_list:
item['qty'] = int(float(item['qty']))
... but won't that cause my QuerySet to evaluate itself completely? I confess to being fairly ignorant of the process by which Django handles lazy execution of queries, but it seems like working with actual values would mean evaluating the query before it needs to.
So, am I complaining about nothing (I mean, it's definitely evaluating these values in the template anyway), or is there a better way to do what I need to do?
Yes, iterating through in the view would evaluate the entire queryset. That may or not be what you want - for example, if you're paginating, the paginator limits the query automatically, so you don't want to evaluate the whole thing separately.
I would approach this in a different way, by calling a function in the template to format the data. You can either do this with a method on the model, if there's just one field you want to format:
class Item(models.Model):
...
def get_formatted_qty(self):
return int(float(self.qty))
and call it:
{{ item.get_formatted_qty }}
Or, to make it more general, you can define a custom filter in your templatetags:
#register.filter
def format_value(value):
return int(float(value))
{{ item.qty|format }}
I have the following model structure:
class Container(models.Model):
pass
class Generic(models.Model):
name = models.CharacterField(unique=True)
cont = models.ManyToManyField(Container, null=True)
# It is possible to have a Generic object not associated with any container,
# thats why null=True
class Specific1(Generic):
...
class Specific2(Generic):
...
...
class SpecificN(Generic):
...
Say, I need to retrieve all Specific-type models, that have a relationship with a particular Container.
The SQL for that is more or less trivial, but that is not the question. Unfortunately, I am not very experienced at working with ORMs (Django's ORM in particular), so I might be missing a pattern here.
When done in a brute-force manner, -
c = Container.objects.get(name='somename') # this gets me the container
items = c.generic_set.all()
# this gets me all Generic objects, that are related to the container
# Now what? I need to get to the actual Specific objects, so I need to somehow
# get the type of the underlying Specific object and get it
for item in items:
spec = getattr(item, item.get_my_specific_type())
this results in a ton of db hits (one for each Generic record, that relates to a Container), so this is obviously not the way to do it. Now, it could, perhaps, be done by getting the SpecificX objects directly:
s = Specific1.objects.filter(cont__name='somename')
# This gets me all Specific1 objects for the specified container
...
# do it for every Specific type
that way the db will be hit once for each Specific type (acceptable, I guess).
I know, that .select_related() doesn't work with m2m relationships, so it is not of much help here.
To reiterate, the end result has to be a collection of SpecificX objects (not Generic).
I think you've already outlined the two easy possibilities. Either you do a single filter query against Generic and then cast each item to its Specific subtype (results in n+1 queries, where n is the number of items returned), or you make a separate query against each Specific table (results in k queries, where k is the number of Specific types).
It's actually worth benchmarking to see which of these is faster in reality. The second seems better because it's (probably) fewer queries, but each one of those queries has to perform a join with the m2m intermediate table. In the former case you only do one join query, and then many simple ones. Some database backends perform better with lots of small queries than fewer, more complex ones.
If the second is actually significantly faster for your use case, and you're willing to do some extra work to clean up your code, it should be possible to write a custom manager method for the Generic model that "pre-fetches" all the subtype data from the relevant Specific tables for a given queryset, using only one query per subtype table; similar to how this snippet optimizes generic foreign keys with a bulk prefetch. This would give you the same queries as your second option, with the DRYer syntax of your first option.
Not a complete answer but you can avoid a great number of hits by doing this
items= list(items)
for item in items:
spec = getattr(item, item.get_my_specific_type())
instead of this :
for item in items:
spec = getattr(item, item.get_my_specific_type())
Indeed, by forcing a cast to a python list, you force the django orm to load all elements in your queryset. It then does this in one query.
I accidentally stubmled upon the following post, which pretty much answers your question :
http://lazypython.blogspot.com/2008/11/timeline-view-in-django.html