Search multiple fields of django model without 3rd party app

Question

I have a single model in my django app that I want to create a search form for. Is there a way to search all the fields in the model at once with the same search string? I've looked into xapian and solr but they seem like a lot of overhead for searching over 1 model. I want to be able to say something like:

results = Assignment.objects.filter(any_column = search_string)

I realize there might not be something that concise but right now the only option I can come up with other than using a search app is to check each field separately and concatenate the results together.

Answer 1

Once you have all the field names you can create Q objects using kwarg expansion and use reduce() along with operator.or_ to turn them into a single query.

qgroup = reduce(operator.or_, (Q(**{fieldname: value}) for fieldname in fieldnames))
asgns = Assignment.objects.filter(qgroup)