Indexers

Indexers provide the binding between the data in the ORM and the data which is indexed in ElasticSearch.

To perform data serialization, indexers build upon the REST framework’s serializers, which allow great flexibility in how you map the data in the ORM and the JSON representation which is sent to ElasticSearch.

Declaring indexers

For example, let’s consider the following model:

class Book(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=200)

You would start with a simple serializer:

class BookSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
    class Meta:
        model = Book
        fields = (
            'id',
            'title',
        )

You can then create an indexer:

from rest_search import indexers

class BookIndexer(indexers.Indexer):
    serializer_class = BookSerializer

    def get_queryset(self):
        return Book.objects.all()

And finally you register the indexer:

indexers.register(BookIndexer)

Options

When declaring an indexer, you can specify some additional properties:

• index: the name of the ElasticSearch index, defaults to the model name in lowercase

Index updates

When you register an indexer, it will install signal handlers for save and delete events and queue updates to the ElasticSearch index.

For these updates to actually be performed, either install the `rest_search.middleware.FlushUpdatesMiddleware` middleware or wrap your code using the `rest_search.decorators.flush_updates` decorator.