Surfing in Kansas

It's been a little over a year since I started doing Django development full-time, for one of them real jobs. Around that time, there were a few large problems in the community that hadn't been solved yet. They were kind of blemishes when you would talk to people about Django, and I'm happy that most of them have been solved.

This will be a series of posts that talk about the different big problems that have been solved, and how they have been addressed in the community.

Search

Search was probably the biggest annoyance for Django. It is something that every site needs, and something that just wasn't really happening in the Django community. 2008's Summer Of Code ended with djangosearch as a half-finished shell, that needed to be better architected; but it did show a good push in the realm of search.

Out of those ashes, comes an awesome solution to the search problem in Django. Haystack is something I am more familiar with (we use it in production at work), and is the brain child of the ever modest, house rocking Daniel Lindsley. It provides a number of Django patterns applied to search, which makes it easier to internalize.

Note: Another approach to search is available, which patches django's ORM. This uses the existing full-text search in your database.

Useful Haystack Patterns

Registration

The registration pattern of the admin allows you to unobtrusively make models searchable (including code you don't have access to). This allows you to register Django Comments as searchable for example, without forking the code base. This will look similar to the admin:

from haystack import site
site.register(Note, NoteIndex)

Search Querysets

Haystack provides an interface familiar to the Django ORM Queryset API. This gives you most of the commonly used functions from the ORM, but allowing you to use them on searches!

unfriendly_results = SearchQuerySet().exclude(content='hello').filter(content='world')
unfriendly_results.order_by('-pub_date')[:5]

It also gives you Search specific methods such as boost and facet.

Class Based Views

In 1.2, hopefully generic views will be class based. Haystack has an implementation of these as well. Like any other kind of class, it provides the easy ability to override functionality through subclassing.

This (simplified) example from the source shows how easy it is to provide extra context to a search view.

class FacetedSearchView(SearchView):
    def extra_context(self):
        extra = super(FacetedSearchView, self).extra_context()
        extra['facets'] = self.results.facet_counts()
        return extra

Pluggable Backends

Haystack currently supports three different search backends: Whoosh, Xapian, and Solr. With a publicly documented backend API, you can enjoy all of the power of the search engine of your choice, by providing a backend for it!

HAYSTACK_SEARCH_ENGINE = 'solr'

Documentation

A shining light in the Django world is the documentation. It is often talked about as being the biggest factor for how people learn Django and love it is the documentation. Haystack is another package with fantastic documentation. Here are a couple of little gems that really show the quality and thought that has been put into them:

• 7 step tutorial
• Debugging Haystack
• Best Practices
• Reference

The docs cover ways to improve your search and make it awesome, as well as just helping you get the software set up and running. The information is invaluable, and will help you make the search on your site really great!

Are you using Haystack?

If I'm preaching to the choir and you already use Haystack, there is a growing list of users that are using haystack. Daniel would love for you to contact him, and get yourself added to the list.

Did I miss anything?

Let me know what you love (or hate) about Haystack. I think it reuses a lot of the good patterns in Django, allowing people to take knowledge they already have, and apply it to a new problem domain easily. Is there anything that you don't like, or something that you love that I missed? Let me know in the comments!