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

Why not at the level model?

class Meta:
    ordering = ['field',]

Or at the level admin?

class Admin:
    ordering       = ('field',)