Enable PostgreSQL full text searching

[jeremystretch]

NetBox version

v2.11.11

Feature type

New functionality

Proposed functionality

Extend NetBox's search functionality to employ PostgreSQL's native full text search capability. This is already supported by Django: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.2/ref/contrib/postgres/search/

I haven't dug into this too much yet, but it appears to be pretty straightforward. I expect the bulk of the work will involve replacing our sets of filter() parameters with SearchQuery and SearchVector instances, and adding a common SearchVectorField to all appropriate models.

I'm also open to alternative strategies for improving NetBox's global search performance, however any such proposals should be opened as separate feature requests and referenced here.

Use case

This change should provide much more robust search functionality, and allow us to rank search results according to customizable rankings per model.

Database changes

We'll likely need to add a new SearchVectorField to each searchable model.

External dependencies

No response

[samschmitt22]

Would this enable global searching based off of any object fields? That would be a great feature to have to find things that we might not know the name of 100%

Would this enable global searching based off of any object fields? That would be a great feature to have to find things that we might not know the name of 100%

Including MAC addresses. :-)

[hagbarddenstore]

From the plugin framework workgroup:

Be able to add models defined in plugins to the global / full text search capabilities mentioned here.

[PieterL75]

Looking forward to v3.3 with this full-text search !

[jeremystretch]

Unfortunately it doesn't look like we'll be able to tackle this in v3.3 without additional help. A lot of work is still needed to determine exactly how this should be implemented, and any overlap with a future indexer (yet to be determined) must be evaluated.