django-multiseek

Graphical query builder for Django. Lets your end users compose nested AND/OR/AND-NOT searches across multiple fields, save and load form presets, and pick the result rendering — without writing any SQL.

The Python core (multiseek/logic.py, multiseek/views.py, multiseek/models.py) is UI-agnostic. Four reference frontends ship as runnable example projects under examples/.

Depends on:

• Django
• django-autocomplete-light

Supported configurations:

Django	Python 3.10	Python 3.11	Python 3.12	Python 3.13
4.2	+	+	+	+
5.1	+	+	+	+
5.2	+	+	+	+
6.0			+	+

Installation

pip install django-multiseek

Or with uv:

uv add django-multiseek

Example projects (recommended starting point)

Four runnable Django projects under examples/, each demonstrating a different UI on top of the same Python core. Run any of them — or all four — with the helper script at the repo root:

./run_example.sh setup           # prepare all four (idempotent)
./run_example.sh run htmx        # setup + start dev server on :8000
./run_example.sh test            # run every example's Playwright suite
./run_example.sh test bootstrap  # one example's tests

Example	UI stack	Project JS	When to pick it
examples/minimal	Foundation 6 + jQuery	~26 KB jQuery widgets	You like the original look, but want no yarn build step
examples/bootstrap	Bootstrap 5 + jQuery	~26 KB jQuery widgets	Your project already uses Bootstrap
examples/alpine	Bootstrap 5 + Alpine.js	~14 KB Alpine components	Drop jQuery, keep a small declarative JS layer
examples/htmx	htmx (server-rendered fragments)	0 KB project JS	Eliminate JS state management entirely

What run_example.sh does

• setup [name] — for one example, or all four:
  • uv sync --all-extras (only for examples that ship their own pyproject.toml; currently alpine)
  • manage.py migrate (creates the SQLite DB)
  • manage.py fetch_assets — downloads JS/CSS deps from CDN into static/multiseek/vendor/ so the example renders without depending on a public CDN at runtime. Idempotent; skips files already present.
  • manage.py initial_data — seeds 7 languages, 8 authors, 27 books (varied titles/years/multi-author/dates so every field type has something interesting to filter on).
• run <name> — runs setup then manage.py runserver for that example. Open http://127.0.0.1:8000/multiseek/.
• test [name] — runs setup then pytest --browser chromium. With no name, runs all four in sequence and exits non-zero if any failed (drop-in for CI).

Manual setup (without run_example.sh)

If you'd rather run the steps yourself:

cd examples/<minimal|bootstrap|alpine|htmx>
uv sync                              # only required for alpine (own pyproject.toml)
uv run python manage.py migrate
uv run python manage.py fetch_assets
uv run python manage.py initial_data
uv run python manage.py runserver

Architecture: how the UI variants share one core

multiseek/logic.py exports a JSON wire format. Each frontend's job is to:

1. let the user build a nested form,
2. produce the JSON the registry expects (or, for htmx, mutate the session JSON one fragment at a time),
3. POST or GET it back to multiseek's bundled views.

See docs/FRONTENDS.md for the full design, per-variant tradeoffs, and the wire-format invariants.

test_project/ — full-feature reference

The repo also contains test_project/ — the canonical full-feature Foundation/jQuery demo. Unlike the example projects, it uses yarn to fetch its frontend assets and is the home of the Playwright test suite that runs in CI against the multiseek package itself. To run it:

uv sync --all-extras
cd test_project
yarn
uv run python manage.py collectstatic --noinput -v0
uv run python manage.py migrate
uv run python manage.py initial_data
uv run python manage.py runserver

License

MIT License. See LICENSE for details.