Is there a clever way to get the previous/next item using the Django ORM?

Question

Say I have a list of photos ordered by creation date, as follows:

class Photo(models.Model):
    title = models.Char()
    image = models.Image()
    created         


        

Answer 1

get_next_by_foo and get_previous_by_foo are handy, but very limited - they don't help you if you're ordering on more than one field, or a non-date field.

I wrote django-next-prev as a more generic implementation of the same idea. In your case you could just do this, since you've set the ordering in your Meta:

from next_prev import next_in_order, prev_in_order
from .models import Photo

photo = Photo.objects.get(...)
next = next_in_order(photo)
prev = prev_in_order(photo)

If you wanted to order on some other combination of fields, just pass the queryset:

photos = Photo.objects.order_by('title')
photo = photos.get(...)
next = next_in_order(photo, qs=photos)