Multi-line queries (Shift+Enter)

DjangoQL queries are whitespace-insensitive, so a query can span several lines:

author.name = "Stanisław Lem"
  and written >= 1960
  and (genre = "scifi" or genre = "novel")

The completion widget, however, binds Enter to submit the search. That is the right default — you usually want to run the query as soon as it is typed — but it leaves no obvious way to insert a newline.

multiline.js fixes that:

Key	Action
Enter	Submit the query (unchanged)
Shift+Enter	Insert a newline at the caret

In the Django admin

Nothing to do. DjangoQLSearchMixin already loads multiline.js next to the completion widget, so Shift+Enter works in the admin search box out of the box.

Outside the admin (your own front-end)

multiline.js is a small, framework-agnostic library primitive. It imposes no styling and no editor — it only turns Shift+Enter into a newline. How a multi-line query box looks and behaves beyond that is your decision.

Load the script and mark your textarea with one of the recognised hooks:

<textarea class="djangoql" name="search"></textarea>
<script src="{% static 'djangoql/js/multiline.js' %}"></script>

Recognised automatically: textarea[name="q"] (the admin box), textarea.djangoql, and textarea[data-djangoql]. To opt a specific element in explicitly:

DjangoQLMultiline.enable(document.getElementById('my-query-box'));

Or change which elements are matched:

DjangoQLMultiline.selector = 'textarea.my-query';

How it works

The script attaches a single capture-phase keydown listener on document. Capture runs before the widget's own (bubble-phase) handler, so on Shift+Enter it inserts a newline and calls stopImmediatePropagation() — the widget never sees the event and therefore never submits. Plain Enter is left untouched and falls through to the widget. Because the listener lives on document, it does not matter when or how the target textarea was created.

See also: Pretty-print / formatting to auto-indent a multi-line query.