django-haystack: how to access the spelling suggestions on the template?

Question

I'm trying django-haystack with Solr and HAYSTACK_INCLUDE_SPELLING = True.

How do you access the spelling suggestions on the template (generated by the default SearchView) ?

Edit: another question: Can the Spelling Suggestion find words from the database ? For example, using the default Note model from the haystack doc, and the default SearchView, there is no spelling suggestions when I search the word "Lorm" when the database contains a note called "Lorem ipsum". Is it normal ?

Thanks :-)

Answer 1

If you have the search query set in the template, you can do:

{{ sqs.spelling_suggestion }}

Look at: http://docs.haystacksearch.org/dev/searchqueryset_api.html#spelling-suggestion

for more details.

For haystack to find the spelling suggestions, the search template should include the field you are looking for. So if you search template includes {{ object.title }} you should be picking up the spelling suggestion.

Maybe you forgot to do

python manage.py update_index

after you added the lorem note.

Answer 2

{{ suggestion }} should suffice if you are using the default SearchView.

See:

https://github.com/toastdriven/django-haystack/blob/master/haystack/views.py#L118

...to see what is available in the template context.

Hassan is correct in stating that you must update/rebuild your index and that you need the right fields in your search template.

Answer 3

I found that the above mentioned solutions only work if we are extending the haystack.views.SearchView. The new generic views based SearchView i.e haystack.generic_views.SearchView do not seem to be adding the suggestion field to the context and we will not be able to access this context variable {{ suggestion }}.

We will need to manually add it to the context as follows:

from haystack.generic_views import SearchView

# Custom view.
class MySearchView(SearchView):

    template_name = 'search/search.html'
    queryset = SearchQuerySet().all()
    form_class = SearchForm  

    def get_context_data(self, *args, **kwargs):
        context = super(MySearchView, self).get_context_data(*args, **kwargs)

        # Add any additional context data we need to display in forms
        spell_suggestion = self.get_form().get_suggestion()
        context['spell_suggestion'] = spell_suggestion

        return context

Add the view to urls.py

urlpatterns = [
    path('search/', MySearchView.as_view(), name='haystack_search'),

And then in the search.html access the context variable as {{ spell_suggestion }}

Hope this helps :)

Reference: https://django-haystack.readthedocs.io/en/v2.4.1/views_and_forms.html#upgrading