Custom ordering in Django

Question

How do you define a specific ordering in Django QuerySets?

Specifically, if I have a QuerySet like so: [\'a10\', \'a1\', \'a2\']

Answer 1

@Jarret's answer (do the sort in Python) works great for simple cases. As soon as you have a large table and want to, say, pull only the first page of results sorted in a certain way, this approach breaks (you have to pull every single row from the database before you can do the sort). At that point I would look into adding a denormalized "sort" field which you populate from the "name" field at save-time, that you can sort on at the DB-level in the usual way.