[SOLVED] How do I make a QuerySet in Django to see if a name in the database is a substring of my query string?

How do I make a QuerySet in Django to see if a name in the database is a substring of my query string?

As the title mentions, I am working in Django and trying to make a QuerySet to return all "Customer" models that have a name value that is a substring of my query_string.

I want something like this:

Customer.objects.filter(firstName__icontains=query_string)

But in reverse:

Customer.objects.filter(query_string__icontains=firstName)

Except that obviously doesn't work.

I am struggling to find any information on how I would go about this.

Thanks in advance.

Edit My expected input will be in Japanese - Kana and Kanji　かな、カナ、漢字

Solution

Thanks to everyone for the answers! I was able to solve my problem by building off of @brad's answer.

I took his approach of defining a custom lookup. It pretty much looks like his, but I configured it for MySQL.

class LowerContainedBy(Lookup):
lookup_name = 'icontained_by'

def as_mysql(self, compiler, connection):
    lhs, lhs_params = self.process_lhs(compiler, connection)
    rhs, rhs_params = self.process_rhs(compiler, connection)
    params = lhs_params + rhs_params
    return  "LOWER({0}) LIKE LOWER(CONCAT('%%',{1},'%%'))".format(lhs, rhs), params

Field.register_lookup(LowerContainedBy)

(I also noticed the rhs and lhs was flipped in his answer so keep that in mind!)

And finally by implementing the new lookup like so:

searchResults = Customer.objects.filter(firstName__icontained_by=search_string).exclude(contract='').order_by('-dateCreated')