Installation

Search Form depends on jQuery 1.2.X so you need to download it and put in your media directory. After that you can install search form. Just type:

easy_install searchform

and Easy Install will go to the Cheeseshop and grab the last searchform for you. It will also install it for you in your site-packages directory at no extra cost :-)

Tutorial

Using search form is quite simple. Just follow these simple steps:

1. Add ‘searchform’ to your INSTALLED_APPS tuple in your settings.py. This is neccesary so Django can find the default searchform templates.

2. Add the following url to your urls.py before your regular media url:

   (r'^media/searchform/', include('searchform.urls'))

Now, suppose you have this simple model in your application:

class Animal(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=100)
    weight = models.CharField(max_length=100)
    max_speed = models.IntegerField()

And you want to make a search form that lets your users find animals in your wild database:

from django.utils.datastructures import SortedDict

from searchform.forms import SearchForm
from searchform.terms import TextSearchTerm

class AnimalSearchForm(SearchForm):
    fields = SortedDict((
        ('name': TextSearchForm('The name', 'Name', 'which name')),
        ('weight': TextSearchForm('The weight', 'Weight', 'which weight')),
        ('max_speed': TextSearchForm('The max speed', 'Speed',
                                     'which max speed')),
        ))

Believe it or not that’s all the python code you need to write to set up your search form. Now it’s time to use it in your views:

def advanced_search(request):
    form = AnimalSearchForm('Find animals!', None)
    return render_to_response('your_template.html', {'form': form})

Finally let’s see how your template looks like:

{% extends "base.html" %}

{% block extrahead %}
  <script type="text/javascript" src="{{ MEDIA_URL }}js/jquery-1.2.6.js"></script>
  {{ form.render_media|safe }}
{% endblock %}

{% block content %}
<div id="search_form">

  <form action="{% url yourapp.views.search_results %}" method="get">
    {{ form }}
  </form>

</div>
{% endblock %}

Two things worth noting here:

• You need to include jQuery before the media of the form

• The search form must have the id ‘search_form’

TODO: explain how to customize the templates and how to write custom search terms. Explain what the QueryStringManager is

0.1.1 (2010-12-22)

• Fix a packaging issue: media files weren’t being installed

0.1.0 (2008-12-16)

• Initial release