django admin order by alphabet

Question

i am using django-admin, and i have a model as following. it shows as a dropdown list in the admin. how can i order it by alphabet? instead of default user ID?

user= models.ForeignKey(User)

Answer 1

The problem you describe is, according to Django core devs, a feature, not a bug. In the beginning, Django ordered the User field alphabetically, but this resulted in a performance issue for really big sites (namely Pownce at the time) with hundreds of thousands of users. But instead of asking the few huge Django websites to implement a workaround, the ordering was simply removed, and now every site that has models with a ForeignKey to User has a usability problem.

I posted an ugly workaround on the Django issue tracker about a year ago. Daniel Roseman posted a similar (and IMHO better) solution in another Stackoverflow question.

Answer 2

Create a custom form for your model and assign it to your ModelAdmin subclass -- you can override the ordering for the ModelChoiceField in the form's __init__. For example:

# models.py
from django.db import models
from django.contrib.auth.models import User

class MyModel(models.Model):
    user = models.ForeignKey(User)
    # Other model fields ...

# forms.py
from django import forms
from django.contrib.auth.models import User
from myapp.models import MyModel

class MyModelForm(forms.ModelForm):
    class Meta:
        model = MyModel

    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        super(MyModelForm, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)
        self.fields['user'].queryset = User.objects.order_by('first_name', 'last_name')

# admin.py
from django.contrib import admin
from myapp.models import MyModel
from myapp.forms import MyModelForm

class MyModelAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    form = MyModelForm
    # Other admin attributes ...

admin.site.register(MyModel, MyModelForm)