searching failing in multiple scenarios

I’ve found a multiple scenarios where existing column search is failing badly:

• search on fields that are foreign keys or numbers (eg. integers) - this will fail on “proper” databases (not sqlite)
• search on fields that are aliases to some other columns, e.g.:

detail_name = serializers.CharField(source='detail.name', read_only=True)

existing code assumes incorrectly that field name is the database field to query

most of those searches will fail twice - on “general” search - where top search field is used and then second time on the specific field

I do not have a clear idea how to resolve this, but those my first ideas:

• there should be an implementation that is similar to the existing ones - where searchable fields will be specified on python side - not pushed from request - this is potentially a security/performance leak
• there should be an option that is defining which fields are taken into account in “global” search
• there should be a detection and/or specification of default search operators per field type, where a safe options should be set as defaults (e.g. __exact or __iexact) and user could override them (eg. __icontains/__istartswith etc.)
• maybe there will be an option to use existing filtering backends in combination with this one?

[WillowMist]

I believe I’m experiencing a similar issue, but not with foreign objects, but calculated fields on the object. For example, I have a calculated field that checks all of the foreignkey objects for the latest entry, and failing to find that, defaults to a field on the object itself.

So I have a method on the object called ‘get_medals’ – Search and sort are both failing because it can’t find that field on the model.

[izimobil]

Thanks to @TauPan, DRFD now fully supports django-filter. I’m closing this issue, basic filtering is good enough for small projects, and more complex filtering can no be done quite simply with django-filter.