Best way to do an A-Z list in Django?

Question

I've been hunting around and Googling for examples, but I can't see an obvious best way to do an A-Z list of entries in Django.

I have around 2,000 placenames in a db. Rather than display them all on the same page, I'd like to have tabs or hyperlinks and an A-Z list of names.

Something like this A-Z list. Bonus points if it's possible to create a similar page which allows users to page through by a db field, rather than A-Z.

Surely I don't need to roll my own code for this in Django - it must be a common problem. Can anyone provide any good examples, or even a Django app to make this straightforward?

Answer 1

You just need to filter your queryset according to what the user has selected:

Case insensitive:

Entry.objects.filter(field__istartswith='a')

Case sensitive:

Entry.objects.filter(field__startswith='A')

Answer 2

Alphabetical pagination might also be useful to you -- see something like http://www.djangosnippets.org/snippets/1364/