Specifying an alternate path for a Haystack template

Question

The Haystack documentation states that:

Additionally, we’re providing use_template=True on the text field. This allows us to use a data template (rather than error-prone concatenation) to build the document the search engine will index. You’ll need to create a new template inside your template directory called search/indexes/myapp/note_text.txt

Unfortunately, there is no information on what to do if you want a differently named template.

Is it possible to specify the path to a haystack document template?

Answer 1

Dang it, I was searching for this for a week.

Its listed under the SearchField API documentation, which is the superclass of the actual fields in a search index.

SearchField.template_name

Allows you to override the name of the template to use when preparing data. By default, the data templates for fields are located within your TEMPLATE_DIRS under a path like search/indexes/{app_label}/{model_name}_{field_name}.txt. This option lets you override that path (though still within TEMPLATE_DIRS).

Example:

bio = CharField(use_template=True, template_name='myapp/data/bio.txt')

You can also provide a list of templates, as loader.select_template is used under the hood.

Example:

bio = CharField(use_template=True, template_name=['myapp/data/bio.txt', 'myapp/bio.txt', 'bio.txt'])