How to sort a list of objects in a template in alphabetic order?

Question

I want to display a list of objects in a Django generic display view `ListView` class. And, to make it prettier, I try to sort it in alphabetic order. So, I use the built-in `dictsort` tag to sort the list. Here is the summary of the code I used: ``` {% for item in object_list|dictsort:"name" %} ... {% empty %} ... {% endfor %} ``` The problem is that it sorts the names according to the ASCII values of the characters, meaning that bigcaps and smallcaps are sorted differently. Here is an example: ``` Bob Eve alice zoe ``` And, what I would like to have is the following: ``` alice Bob Eve zoe ``` I looked the documentation and several questions in SO, with no success. So, if someone has a way to achieve this, I would be extremely grateful.

Accepted Answer

You'll need to write a custom filter which sorts by lower case. It's pretty simple:

```
@register.filter
def sort_lower(lst, key_name):
    return sorted(lst, key=lambda item: getattr(item, key_name).lower())
```

But if your list is a set of objects from the database, you shouldn't really be sorting them in Python - you should get the database to return them in the order you want.

Edit

How are you using the filter? It should be exactly the same as the dictsort one: `object_list|sort_lower:"name"`.

To sort the queryset in the database, you can use the `extra` method to add a lower-case version of the field:

```
MyModel.objects.all().extra(select={'lower_name': 'LOWER(NAME)'}, order_by='lower_name')
```

How to sort a list of objects in a template in alphabetic order?

Solution

Problem