PostgreSQL full-text search in the Django Admin

Django 3.1 introduces PostgreSQL search_type="websearch" - which gives you search with advanced operators like "phrase search" -excluding. James Turk wrote about this here, and it's also in my weeknotes.

I decided to add it to my Django Admin interface. It was really easy using the get_search_results() model admin method, documented here.

My models already have a search_document full-text search column, as described in Implementing faceted search with Django and PostgreSQL. So all I needed to add to my ModelAdmin subclasses was this:

    def get_search_results(self, request, queryset, search_term):
        if not search_term:
            return super().get_search_results(
                request, queryset, search_term
            )
        query = SearchQuery(search_term, search_type="websearch")
        rank = SearchRank(F("search_document"), query)
        queryset = (
            queryset
            .annotate(rank=rank)
            .filter(search_document=query)
            .order_by("-rank")
        )
        return queryset, False

Here's the full implementation for my personal blog.

Created 2020-07-25T15:36:17-07:00 · Edit