[patch] New search_filter for default manager

[Simon Litchfield <simon@…>]

Simple convenience method to run filter() using field lookups and values from supplied dicts.

mysearch = {'myfield': 'myfield', 
           'mytext': 'mytext__startswith', 
           'mydate': 'mydata__lte',
    }
formdata = {'myfield': 'somevalue', 
            'mytext': 'h', 
            'mydate': ''
    }
results = MyObject.objects.search_filter(lookups=mysearch, data=formdata)

Would be exactly the same as --

filter(myfield='somevalue', mytext__startswith='h')

Skips empty values. Useful for searching against form or request data.

[Chris Beaven]

I don't know if this is really necessary. But maybe Simon will try and convince us some more ;)

[Simon Litchfield <simon@…>]

Well you're right Smiley, it's not necessary.

But just imagine showing it to a newbie user (like me), in a tutorial or something. It'd put a big smile on their face to make a form with newforms, and spit their form.clean_data straight into search_filter. Thats your typical 'advanced search' page done in minutes, and only a few lines of code! Sure you just write a loop to build and unpack the params to filter(), but your average new user probably won't think of that. It's only a few extra lines in manager.py.

More specific descriptive naming, like filter_nonblank(), filter_map(ignore_blank=True) or something, might help. Or, you could even whack it into filter(), to keep things more concise. Like filter(lookups={}, data={}), at the risk of conflicting with field names tho, maybe filter(searchlookups={}, searchdata={})..... Anyway over to you guys. Go easy on me I'm only new :-)

[Jacob]

Chris is completely right: this is not necessary. New users will be better served in the long run by figuring out how to use kwargs.