A filtering and sorting DSL for the Django REST framework

This package provides a small domain-specific language (DSL) for filtering and sorting the views provided using Django REST framework by GET parameters.

The filtering and sorting is performed by Django's querysets, so the SQL injection protection provided by django is also used for the filtering. The fields of the model can be used in the queries in the DSL.

Syntax

Filtering

The basic filter syntax for a comparison of a field to a value is as follow

[field] ([negation]) [filter operator] [value]

The field is the name of the model field to be queried. The value is the value the field shall be compared to. Values for strings and timestamps need to be quoted in single quotes. For boolean fields the values true and false are valid.

The possible values for the filter operator are listed in the table futher below. Some of these filters can be negated with the optional keyword not, to see which operators support negation also see the table below.

Filter operator	Alias	Meaning	Negatable with "not"	Field type requirements
=	eq	"equal to"	= is not, but the eq alias is negatable	-
!=	not eq	"not equal to"	no	-
<	lt	"less than"	no	-
>	gt	"greater than"	no	-
<=	lte	"less than or equal to"	no	-
>=	gte	"greater than or equal to"	no	-
contains		substring search (case sensitive)	yes	requires text or char fields
icontains		substring search (case insensitive)	yes	requires text or char fields
startswith		substring search at the beginning of the field value (case sensitive)	yes	requires text or char fields
istartswith		substring search at the beginning of the field value (case insensitive)	yes	requires text or char fields
endswith		substring search at the end of the field value (case sensitive)	yes	requires text or char fields
iendswith		substring search at the end of the field value (case insensitive)	yes	requires text or char fields
isnull		value must be NULL	yes	-

It is possible to combine multiple filters using the logical operators and and or. or has precedence over and. It is also possible to use parenthesis: ( and ).

The default name of the GET parameter for filtering is filter.

Sorting

The basic sorting syntax is

([direction])(field)

The name of the field is mandatory. The direction is optional an when not set +, which means ascending order is implied. To sort in descending order use -.

Multiple sorting operations can be chained by separating them with ,. The first terms will be used first for the ordering, then the following term(s) will be used.

The default name of the GET parameter for sorting is sort.

Example queries

The queries in this section use the API provided by the unittest application in the tests directory of this repository.

The queries need to be correctly escaped before being send. The ones listed further down this section are listed un-escaped for a better readability. Escape should happen in the following form: age < legs should be escaped to become:

GET /animal?filter=age+%3C+legs

Description	Filter query	Sort query
An empty filter
Match an integer field	age = 132
Match the boolean field "is_bird" to be true	is_bird = true
Match NULL values	favorite_food isnull
Match Non-NULL values	favorite_food not isnull
Compare a timestamp	birthday < '2007-10-13T11:13:09.250219+00:00'
Chain multiple filters with "AND"	name = 'tortoise' and age >= 100
Chain multiple filters with "OR"	name = 'tortoise' or name = 'dog'
Implicit sort by the field "name" in ascending order		name
Explicit sort by the field "name" in ascending order		+name
Sort by the field "name" in descending order		-name
Sort by the "legs" field in descending order and name in ascending order		-legs,+name
Compare the two fields "age" and "legs"	age < legs
Match the field name to contain the substring "rtoi"	name contains 'rtoi'
Match the field name to NOT contain the substring "rtoi"	name not contains 'rtoi'
Combination of filtering and sorting	name startswith 'd'	sort=-id

Using this module in your application

This module just provides a custom DjangoFilterBackend which can be used like in the following example:

from rest_framework import generics
from rest_framework_filterdsl import FilterDSLBackend
...

class MyListView(generics.ListAPIView):
    ...
    filter_backends = (FilterDSLBackend,)
    ...

Settings like the names of the GET parameters or the casts for the user-provided values can be customized by subclassing the FilterDSLBackend implementation.

For more example usage please also see the unittests of this repository. Additional the REST framework filtering documentation may be helpful.

Unittests

This projects includes a set of unittests implemented using pytest. To run these use the runtests.sh script.

License

See LICENSE.txt.