Django Haystack select which fields to search

Question

Suppose I have a Person model looking like this:

class Person(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=300, blank=True,  null=True)
    first_name = models.CharField(max_length=300, blank=True,  null=True)
    last_name = models.CharField(max_length=300, blank=False, null=False)

And a Haystack search index like this:

class NoteIndex(indexes.SearchIndex, indexes.Indexable):
    text = indexes.CharField(document=True, use_template=True)
    title = indexes.CharField(model_attr='title')
    first_name = indexes.CharField(model_attr='first_name')
    last_name = indexes.CharField(model_attr='last_name')

Say the template includes all three fields(firstname, lastname and title). If users should be able to choose in which fields to search for, do I need to build seperate indices for all possible permutations? Or can I narrow down the search to one or two of the three fields?

If so how?

I know that I am able to filter SearchQuerySets using .filter().

 SearchQuerySet().filter(first_name='foo')

But this filters the set for exact values. Even __icontains is limited to one field filtering.

Answer 1

You can use AutoQuery instead of the standard filter:

from haystack.inputs import AutoQuery


SearchQuerySet().filter(first_name=AutoQuery('foo'))

https://django-haystack.readthedocs.io/en/v2.4.1/inputtypes.html#autoquery

EDITED In order to run OR query with "haystack" use SQ objects:

from haystack.backends import SQ
from haystack.inputs import AutoQuery

SearchQuerySet().filter(
    SQ(first_name=AutoQuery('foo')) | SQ(last_name=AutoQuery('foo'))
)

https://django-haystack.readthedocs.io/en/v2.4.1/searchquery_api.html#sq-objects