Searching Books

Part of the Models and the Admin section of Coddy's Django journey. Lesson 15 of 23.

Your shelf needs a search box. A search page reads what the visitor typed from the address. In /search/?q=dune, the part after ? is the query string, and Django puts its pairs in request.GET, which works like a dictionary. The header's search box is a form that builds this address for you; the Forms section covers forms. A page for one genre could read it like this:

def by_genre(request):
    genre = request.GET.get("genre", "fiction")
    books = Book.objects.filter(genre=genre)
    return render(request, "books/genre.html", {"genre": genre, "books": books})

.get("genre", "fiction") returns the default when the address has no genre; request.GET["genre"] would raise there, a 500. Values are always text: ?page=2 gives "2". Every text contains the empty text, so __icontains="" matches every row.

Challenge

Easy

Add a search page. The template books/search.html is ready and expects q and books.

A view search that reads q from the address (empty text when missing) and finds the books whose title contains it, in any case.
The route search/, named search.

Press Run, search dune in the header, then open /search/.

Try it yourself

from django.shortcuts import get_object_or_404, render

from .models import Book


def home(request):
    books = Book.objects.all()
    return render(request, "books/home.html", {"books": books})


def book_detail(request, pk):
    book = get_object_or_404(Book, pk=pk)
    return render(request, "books/book_detail.html", {"book": book})