[Django]-Which apps/solutions are most appropriate for model based search in Django?

django-filter is a reusable Django application for allowing users to filter
queryset dynamically.

try it 🙂

If you are going to have high traffic, have you thought about basing your search on Solr/Haystack?

Haystack makes setting up searches based on Solr (Lucene) very simple and you basically don’t have to modify your models.

http://haystacksearch.org/

You can even start with Woosh (a non-production search engine for Haystack) and then later add on Solr.

If you are doing such specific field searching, which it seems you are, then advanced queries are the answer. Wait until you actually have performance problems before you worry too much about them. Getting lots of traffic is a much harder problem to solve than dealing with lots of traffic. If you do need to scale this, then remember that hardware is cheap. Just get a really sweet database server that is configured well, and have big-time caching.

You could try to use tools like sphinx, haystack, etc. but those are designed to handle Google-style searches, and not the really specific queries that you are talking about.

To clarify on celopes answer, the way django-haystack works is by allowing you to define a rendered “document” for each model.

So say you have some models…

class Teacher(mdoels.Model):
    name = models.CharFiel(max_length=100)

class Course(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=100)
    teacher = models.ForeignKey(Teacher)

class Student(models.Model):
    name = models.CharFiel(max_length=100)
    grade = models.IntegerField()
    classes = models.ManyToManyField(Course, related_name='students')

class Grade(models.Model):
    value = models.CharField(max_length=1)
    course = models.ForeignKey(Course)
    student = models.ForeignKey(Student, related_name='grades')

In haystack, you’d define a template to render Course…

{% comment %} In this context 'object' represents a Course model {% endcomment %}
<h1>{{ object.name }}</h1>
<h2>{{ object.teacher.name }}</h2>
<ul>
{% for student in object.students %}
    <li>{{ student.name }}</li>
{% endfor %}
</ul>

In this way you’re sort of defining not only a ‘document’ that represents each Course model, but you’re also specifying a priority for pieces of information based on the HTML markup (h1 is more important than h2 which is more important than li).

In terms of overhead these ‘documents’ are rendered by using the haystack management command…

\> manage.py reindex

In this way you could seutp a cron/Scheduler job to reindex at whatever interval you were comfortable with.

Solr also includes some neat things like spelling suggestion, and all those neat things. I initially tried Whoosh with haystack but was dis pointed by it doing funny things with queirest containing a hyphen. Haystack+Solr is a nice combo.