Imagine a model Shirts with a size CharField, with values limited to a small number of choices, e.g. 'small', 'medium', 'large', 'xlarge' etc.
To get the shirts grouped by size, you'd do:
Shirts.objects.order_by('size')
But Django will (naturally) order the groups alphabetically, i.e. 'large' then 'medium' then 'small' then 'xlarge'. What I want is to have 'small' before 'medium' before 'large' etc.
I.e. what I naturally want to do is something like the following pseudocode:
size_order = {'small': 1, 'medium': 2, 'large': 3, 'xlarge': 4}
Shirts.objects.order_by('size_order[size]')
What's the best way to accomplish this?
EDIT: See my comments to answers below for thoughts on various suggested approaches. I've stumbled on a custom Manager/QuerySet approach using the SQL ORDER BY CASE syntax which I'm investigating.