Creating a generic search view in Django - django

Question

I am struggling to create my custom generic view in django to easily create search pages for certain models. I'd like to use it like this:
class MyModelSearchView(SearchView):
template_name = 'path/to/template.html'
model = MyModel
fields = ['name', 'email', 'whatever']
which will result in a view that returns a search form on GET and both form and results on POST.
The fields specifies which fields of MyModel will be available for a user to search.
class SearchView(FormView):
def get_form(self, form_class=None):
# what I'v already tried:
class SearchForm(ModelForm):
class Meta:
model = self.model
fields = self.fields
return SearchForm()
def post(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
# perform searching and return results
The problem with the code above is that form will not be submitted if certain fields are not be properly filled. User should be allowed to provide only part of fields to search but with the code I provided the form generated with ModelForm prevents that (for example because a field in a model cannot be blank).
My questions are:
Is it possible to generate a form based on a model to omit this behaviour?
Or is there any simpler way to create SearchView class?
I don't want to manually write forms if it's possible.

Answer 1

One way to accomplish this is to set blank=True on the field in MyModel, as indicated in the docs:
If the model field has blank=True, then required is set to False on the form field. Otherwise, required=True.
But for this to be a generic solution, you can't count on being able to modify the model fields. You can instead set the fields' required attribute to False immediately after the instance is created:
class SearchForm(ModelForm):
class Meta:
model = self.model
fields = self.fields
def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
super().__init__(*args, **kwargs)
for (field_name, field) in self.fields.items():
field.required = False

Answer 2

Since you're using the ModelForm for searching, you should set all the fields as required=False, by overriding the __init__ method:
def get_form(self, form_class=None):
# what I'v already tried:
class SearchForm(ModelForm):
class Meta:
model = self.model
fields = self.fields
def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
super(SearchForm, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)
for field in self.fields:
self.fields[field].required = False
return SearchForm()
Though I suggest you should user django-filter, which makes it easier and cleaner to filter your searches. First you need to install it:
pip install django-filter
Then add it to your INSTALLED_APPS. After that you can create a filters.py file in your app:
# myapp/filters.py
import django_filters as filters
from .models import MyModel
MyModelFilterSet(filters.FilterSet):
class Meta:
model = MyModel
fields = ['name', 'email', 'whatever']
By default it's going to filter with the __exact lookup. You can change this in a couple of ways, just take a look here and here. To know which lookups you can use, take a look here.
After creating your filters.py file you can add it to a View, like a ListView:
# myapp/views.py
from django.views.generic import ListView
from .filters import MyModelFilterSet
from .models import MyModel
class MyModelSearchView(ListView):
template_name = 'path/to/template.html'
model = MyModel
def get_queryset(self):
qs = self.model.objects.all()
filtered_model_list = MyModelFilterSet(self.request.GET, queryset=qs)
return filtered_model_list.qs
There's a lot more you can do with django-filter. Here's the full documentation.