Customize the search form

[LeVon Smoker]

Is there a good way to do this to...

- change the field labels

- add a custom search widget (autocomplete)

As always, I don't want to hack the original source code...

Thanks.

[Roberto Rosario]

Autocomplete is possible but will require a new API to return the top result values so that a smart widget like Select2 could display them. Possible but requires code changes. 

What do you mean by "change the field labels"? Can you expand on this? This one might be simpler to implement.

[LeVon Smoker]

Using a custom app, I overrode (is that a word?) the appearance/home.html template to point at my own url on the Advanced button ({% url 'my_overrides:search_advanced' search_model='documents.Document' %}). From there it was creating custom versions of AdvancedSearchForm, AdvancedSearchView, and ResultsView to get what I wanted. My version of AdvancedSearchForm adds a ModelMultipleChoiceField which provides an autocomplete way to find specific documents.

In my AdvancedSearchForm, I was able to change the label on a field - Label - to Name (users were confused - "where's the document name?")

[Roberto Rosario]

"I overrode (is that a word?)" I'm not a native speaker, my guess is as good as yours :D

Thanks for sharing your customization. I'll see if we can add some of your changes so you don't have to rewrite all from scratch on the next update.