Django’s “order_by”

Django is awesome for all of the “we’ve already done it so you don’t have to” features. So I am always caught off guard when it falls short.

When you have a QuerySet you can use order_by to order the set before display. This is really handy. Unfortunately, you cannot instruct it to ignore the case of the strings. Debugging this problem was even harder because I stored the strings in the DB as they were entered by users, but only display them in all lowercase on the website. I couldn’t figure out why the list was in two parts, both sorted correctly.

As a fix, I have set the strings to lowercase before they are written to the DB, and gone and changed the current ones to all lowercase. The SQL looks something like;

update table set column=lower(column);

Overall not a huge problem, but it would be pretty slick if Django allowed you to do;

Count.objects.filter(…).order_by(‘name’, ‘ignorecase’

Hope I saved you some anguish.