A-z Index Django

Question

Im looking for advice on desinging a web page with an A - Z index.

Kind of like :

http://www.bls.gov/bls/topicsaz.htm I have a long list of objects, with a title, that I want do display alphabetically, easy!

But I want to put in the A-Z with anchors, do I do this in the template,

I would have to loop through all the objects in the template, storing the currentletter as a global. Then check if each objects starts with the current letter etc etc.

It's not nice, is there any easier way that I am missing.

Maybe I should do it in the python code?

Answer 1

Looking through the django template tags I found a nice way of doing it {{ifchanged}}, its worth mentioning for future use.

My list of objects is passed to my template ordered alphabetically:

Objects.get.all().order_by('title')

Then in my template i do :

# loop through all objects
{% for obj in objs %}
  #display the letter only when it changes
  {% ifchanged obj.title.0 %}<h1>{{obj.title.0}}</h1>{% endifchanged%}
  # display the object
  <h2>obj.title</h2>
{% endfor %}

Its a very handy 1 line peice of code in the template.