PostgreSQL text search in Django not working as expected - django

Question

I am implementing a search function for my API to return the object's properties when requested. So far I have tried to use Full Text Search which is usable but it has these annoying things: words have to be spelled correctly for the results to be returned and partial search, for example "appl" instead of "apple", won't work. I have also tried Trigram Similarity but it failed for long sentences. How do I implement a search function that is both accurate and fuzzy in Django?
This works
This won't work
This is my views.py
from django.shortcuts import render
from rest_framework.response import Response
from rest_framework import status
from rest_framework.decorators import api_view
from .models import Object_Locations
from .serializers import Object_LocationsSerializer
from django.contrib.postgres.search import SearchVector, SearchQuery
def index(request):
return render(request, 'main/base.html', {})
#api_view(['GET',])
def LocationsList(request):
if request.method == 'GET':
vector = SearchVector('name', 'desc', 'catergory')
query = request.GET.get('search')
if query:
locations = Object_Locations.objects.annotate(search=vector,).filter(search=SearchQuery(query))
else:
locations = Object_Locations.objects.all()
serializer = Object_LocationsSerializer(locations, many=True)
return Response(serializer.data)

Answer 1

From the SearchQuery documentation :
SearchQuery translates the terms the user provides into a search query object that the database compares to a search vector. By default, all the words the user provides are passed through the stemming algorithms, and then it looks for matches for all of the resulting terms.
If search_type is 'plain', which is the default, the terms are treated as separate keywords. If search_type is 'phrase', the terms are treated as a single phrase. If search_type is 'raw', then you can provide a formatted search query with terms and operators.
In the code above the SearchQuery with the search phrase "a blac husky" is translated to a SQL code like:
... ## plainto_tsquery('a blac husky') ...
So if you want to have results with similar search phrases it's possible to combine query terms:
from django.contrib.postgres.search import SearchQuery, SearchVector
from django.shortcuts import render
from rest_framework import status
from rest_framework.decorators import api_view
from rest_framework.response import Response
from .models import Object_Locations
from .serializers import Object_LocationsSerializer
def index(request):
return render(request, 'main/base.html', {})
#api_view(['GET',])
def LocationsList(request):
if request.method == 'GET':
vector = SearchVector('name', 'desc', 'catergory')
query_terms = request.GET.get('search')
query_raw = ' | '.join(query_terms.split())
query = SearchQuery(query_raw, search_type='raw')
if query.value:
locations = Object_Locations.objects.annotate(search=vector).filter(search=query)
else:
locations = Object_Locations.objects.all()
serializer = Object_LocationsSerializer(locations, many=True)
return Response(serializer.data)
In the above code the SearchQuery with the search phrase "a blac husky" is translated to a SQL code like:
... ## plainto_tsquery('a | blac | husky') ...
It's possible to use logical operation to combine SearchQuery as described in the documentation I linked.
If you want to deepen further you can read an article that I wrote on the subject:
"Full-Text Search in Django with PostgreSQL"