can you search multiple fields at once with datastore

Question

in my app that im designing for GAE, i want, shall we say an omni search bar.

as i understand how datastore stores records, its basically a hashmap of hashmaps. so i have a key, then something that would look (for conceptional simplicity) a string that would be a JSON return for a value.

in relational DB world, if i wanted to search first and last name at the same time i would have to have something like this

select * from user where user.firstname like 'bob' or user.lastname like 'bob'

with datastore, can i do something like

select from user where user.anyfield like 'bob'

and it would search all the fields of the user entity automatically returning any record where either user.firstname and/or user.lastname was like 'bob'?

App Engine has neither an or nor a like. There are suitable workarounds for both - stackoverflow.com/questions/930966/…, stackoverflow.com/q/47786/70492, respectively. — hyperslug
@hyperslug You should post that as an answre. @scphantm There's nothing preventing you from filtering on multiple properties in App Engine - subject to the restrictions hyperslug mentions. — Nick Johnson

hyperslug hyperslug · Accepted Answer · 2011-04-22T18:42:31

App Engine does not support OR, but as Nick suggests here, you can accomplish the same by doing a query for firstnames and another for lastnames and combining the results.

You also cannot directly do a LIKE comparison, but you can do a "starts with" query, as shown here.

can you search multiple fields at once with datastore

2 Answers