If I understand correctly, currently this works: Question.objects.order_by(Question.pub_date.field_name)
but your proposal is to avoid the need for ".field_name". I don't think I'd use that syntax as its more verbose and less readable (to me, anyway). Having more than one way to write things (string or field reference) isn't great for consistency. Strings would still be needed for referencing things like annotations. On Monday, January 13, 2020 at 11:09:39 AM UTC-5, Matt del Valle wrote: > > Hiya, > > The title says it all. It would be dead useful if you could always use > fields rather than the string name of a field, for example in a QuerySet > order_by(), or in the BaseModelAdmin.ordering class attribute (and probably > many more locations). > > This has the huge advantage of avoiding string literals in your code, > which allows static code analysis (MyPy, Pycharm's inspections, etc.) tools > to warn you if you misspell the field name, or if you later rename the > field. Otherwise such errors end up being hidden until that line of code > happens to be actually run, which has the potential to slip through testing > and end up in production. It also allows refactor/rename tools to > automatically assist with renames in every such location across your Django > project, saving a lot of time and effort. > > It also seems really simple to implement. All you'd need would be a helper > function that did a few if-elif checks for instances of Field or > DeferredAttribute, and returned Field.name and > DeferredAttribute.field.name respectively. It would return strings > unchanged to preserve the current functionality. > > The tricky part would be then tracking down everywhere within Django where > such field name strings are expected and wrapping the input in this > function. > > Is there any chance something like this could be considered as a new > feature? > > Thanks in advance, > Matt > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django developers (Contributions to Django itself)" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to django-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/django-developers/5b3dba4c-2bfa-41dd-8190-bcab48616467%40googlegroups.com.
