Django haystack elasticsearch problems with autocomplete (and queries with Capital letters) - django

Question

I've got a basic django haystack elasticsearch installation running, that seems to be working.. until I hit an autocomplete problem:
It doesn't return autocompletion just the full field. another problem is with data that has CAPS, that isn't normalized (such as usernames..)
MY installation:
django 1.6.4
haystack 2.1.0
elasticsearch 1.3.1
py-elasticsearch 0.6.1
class SocialProfileIndex(indexes.SearchIndex, indexes.Indexable):
text = indexes.CharField(document=True, use_template=True)
username = indexes.CharField(model_attr='username')
first_name = indexes.CharField(model_attr='first_name')
last_name = indexes.CharField(model_attr='last_name')
# Auto-complete
username_auto = indexes.EdgeNgramField(model_attr='username')
first_name_auto = indexes.EdgeNgramField(model_attr='first_name')
last_name_auto = indexes.EdgeNgramField(model_attr='last_name')
def get_model(self):
return SocialProfile
def index_queryset(self, using=None):
return self.get_model().objects.all()
Were in the view I return:
results = SearchQuerySet().models(SocialProfile).autocomplete(username_auto=q)
so when indexing a SocialProfile:
username=alonisser
when q (the query) is 'alonisser' I get the correct reply, But when I try 'alon' or similiar I don't get any results.
When I access elasticsearch directly through py-elasticsearch (without haystack):
es = Elasticsearch('http://elasticsearch.url:9200')
es.search('username_auto:alon', index='haystack')
I do get the correct result, so the is stored there and the problem is probably doing something wrong with haystack..
Similiar but different problems is when the searched item has Caps :like 'Alonisser' so searching for 'alonisser' doesn't return any result, but searching for 'Alonisser' does.
What am I doing wrong? Thanks for the help..

Answer 1

I think you already got an answer in the haystack forums but just to bring it out here also.
One way to get rid of the Caps problem is to use a custom prepare method in your index class although my haystack somehow handles it by default :S.
def prepare_username_auto(self, obj):
return obj.username.lower()
This will convert all usernames to lowercase when you run 'update_index'. Then you can also turn you user inserted search term to lower also which should produce correct results.
To search for a part of the word you need to use:
results = SearchQuerySet().models(SocialProfile).autocomplete(username_auto__startswith=q)