Ordering in Django Admin

There are two ordering attributes that affect the default ordering in the Django Admin ChangeList view.

The ModelAdmin.ordering attribute, and the model's Meta.ordering attribute.

# models.py
class Order(models.Model):
    created_dt = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True)

    class Meta:
        ordering = ('-created_dt',)

# admin.py

class OrderAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    ordering = ('-created_dt',)

Both are a list or tuple specifying the default ordering for the change list.

If both a model's Meta.ordering and ModelAdmin.ordering are set, the ModelAdmin.ordering will take precedence in the Django admin interface. This means that the ordering specified in the ModelAdmin class will be used to order the items in the change list, overriding the ordering specified in the model's Meta class.

Dynamically setting the default ordering for a ModelAdmin:

class YourModelAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    def get_ordering(self, request):
        # Specify the default ordering
        if request.something:
            return ['field1', 'field2']
        return ['-created',]

To specify the list of columns that are allowed for sorting you can use the sortable_by or dynamically via get_sortable_by.

class YourModelAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    sortable_by = ['field1', 'field3']
    # OR
    def get_sortable_by(self, request):
        # Specify the fields that are allowed to be used for sorting
        return ['field1', 'field2']