I ran into trouble overriding django’s ModelAdmin ChangeList Ordering.
Overriding the ModelAdmin.queryset did not help because while the Queryset can be defined, the ordering is overridden by `ChangeList.get_ordering`
My solution is to override the ModelAdmin get_changelist method and return a subclassed ChangeList.
class AccountAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
# ...
def get_changelist(self, request, **kwargs):
"""
Returns the ChangeList class for use on the changelist page.
Force get_ordering to return None (if no ordering specified)
to prevent from applying ordering.
"""
from django.contrib.admin.views.main import ChangeList
class SortedChangeList(ChangeList):
def get_query_set(self, *args, **kwargs):
qs = super(SortedChangeList, self).get_query_set(*args, **kwargs)
return qs.annotate(amt=Sum('entry__amount')).order_by('-amt')
if request.GET.get('o'):
return ChangeList
return SortedChangeList
We take advantage of the fact that get_changelist can be overridden, and the fact that get_query_set is called AFTER ordering is done on the ChangeList.
Let me know if you have other solutions!
Yuji Tomita 
Thank you very much! You save me a lot of time. You rock star!!!
Good stuff. Thanks!
Why the request.GET.get(‘o’):
So as to not break default admin ordering. Otherwise the only ordering we could apply is our custom one.
Also, Django 1.4 has multi column ordering and the syntax has changed so we’ll have to account for that in the future…
ah, cool, thanks. Yes, I saw in the docs for 1.4 that’t it can be done a little more elegantly there – but that’ll have to wait till 1.4 is the recommended stable version.
Have you tried this code with Django 1.4 or 1.5?
Derek, I have just implemented with 1.4
I’m using it a bit differently as I’m overriding the search query to allow users to not have to enter in dashes when searching for phone number
def get_changelist(self, request, **kwargs):
# Allow users to not have to enter in ‘-‘ when searching by phone #
from django.contrib.admin.views.main import ChangeList
if request.GET.get(‘q’):
class NewChangeList(ChangeList):
def get_query_set(self, *args, **kwargs):
query = self.query
if query.isdigit() and len(query) == 10:
self.query = ‘-‘.join(
(query[:3], query[3:6], query[6:])
)
return super(NewChangeList, self).get_query_set(
*args, **kwargs
)
return NewChangeList
else:
return ChangeList
OK; that is interesting. I have been struggling to get a search working on date or datetime fields…
Maybe you can add that new code to your original post as an update; the formatting gets lost in the comments…