How do you paginate results from a dynamic search in Django?

Question

I'm currently building a simple search method for some designs. The query searches both the name of the author and the text of the design. The problem: what happens when the database has 300,000 designs and I want to paginate the results? If I pass a page variable, then each time a user switches to a different page, the query is executed again.

What is the best way to solve this problem? Is it properly caching as many searches as possible? Is it storing a certain amount in session data?

"""
Searches by screenname or design text
"""
def search_designs(request):

    designs = None
    words   = None

    if request.method == 'POST':
        q     = request.POST['search']
        words = q.split()

        # Get all approved designs
        designs = Design.objects.filter(status=2)

        for w in words:
            designs = designs.filter(name__icontains=w) | designs.filter(author__profile__screenname__icontains=w)

    vars = RequestContext(request, 
    {
        'results' : designs,
        'words'   : words,
    })
    return render_to_response("search_test.html", vars)

Answer 1

I would check out django-pagination. It will handle pagination for you on the template level. It's really easy to integrate.

Answer 2

So you're trying to save all the results, so when a user moves through the pages the database is not accessed again, right? Since they're dynamic searches, the only way to do so is to cache these pages, still pages that have not been visited yet, will not be cached. So the only benefit is if the user goes back to previous pages. I don't think you will gain many benefits from this practice.

It's perfectly fine to execute one query every time a user loads a page.

Also, if on your template you're iterating through the query set, each iteration will hit the database. Just before you pass in the query set to the template, use my_query_set = list(my_query_set) to avoid multiple database hits.