Powerful filtering for Django Rest Framework

Overview of Django-RQL framework

Sooner or later each web project experiences necessity for complex filtering. A social app doesn’t make sense without search by connections. A good supply automation platform needs to filter orders by products or marketplaces. Any online store in 2020 allows you to filter goods by N different categories… I could continue this list forever, but I hope that idea is pretty clear. The open question, though, is how complex this filtering needs to be and what it takes to implement it.

Filtering feels so natural nowadays, so it’s considered that every mature framework like Django Rest Framework has all the tools you need. DRF really provides a wide range of libraries, which cover most of the generic technical scenarios. When you release an MVP and domain model of the project is pretty simple, some library like Django-Filter might seem a silver bullet. But as the project gets bigger, APIs expand and domain model gets more and more complex. Pretty soon it can be found out that existing tools do not cover all of your business scenarios and need to be replaced with something more powerful. That’s where Django-RQL comes into play!

To understand the true reasoning for creation of yet-another-library, I want to mention that in CloudBlue Connect we approach filtering as an…