Make ModelAdmin.search_fields raise data errors on __exact lookups for non-string fields.

[Tim Graham]

Currently, ​all queries are done as string lookups which gives something like this on PostgreSQL, for example: ("admin_views_pluggablesearchperson"."age"::text) = UPPER(20)). It would be more efficient if the admin cast the search value to an integer and used that for the query.

[Akshesh Doshi]

PR: ​https://github.com/django/django/pull/6219

[Simon Charette]

I think we should favor the approach suggested in #26184 instead.

[Tim Graham]

I agree, let's revisit this if it doesn't.

[Tim Graham]

As far as I tested, you can now use something like search_fields = ['votes__exact'] to do the appropriate query, however, if a non-integer search term is entered, the page crashes with ValueError invalid literal for int() with base 10: 'abc' from IntegerField.get_prep_value(). Probably that exception should be caught in ModelAdmin.get_search_results() and no results returned.

[Nick Sandford]

PR: ​https://github.com/django/django/pull/10339

[Niclas Olofsson]

Replying to Tim Graham:

As far as I tested, you can now use something like search_fields = ['votes__exact'] to do the appropriate query, however, if a non-integer search term is entered, the page crashes with ValueError invalid literal for int() with base 10: 'abc' from IntegerField.get_prep_value(). Probably that exception should be caught in ModelAdmin.get_search_results() and no results returned.

We have to consider that there might be multiple search fields of mixed types though, i.e. search_fields = ['votes__exact', 'title', 'text__contains'], just so the matches for other fields does not get discarded just because one of the fields threw an error.

Instead of trying to catch these errors from .filter() as in the previous patch, we could run to_python() for each search field in order to test if that particular field would raise an exception later on when the query is run.

[Mariusz Felisiak]

#34191 was a duplicate for DecimalField.

[Myhailo Chernyshov]

Replying to Mariusz Felisiak:

#34191 was a duplicate for DecimalField.

You can use iexact instead of exact for non-string fields, I think, it even makes sense, because the word exact means complete equality even with type. It works for me.

[Sandeep Pal]

can i work on this?

[Saurabh]

PR: ​https://github.com/django/django/pull/17885