Is there a way to always order a table by a specific column in django-tables2?

Question

I'm using django-tables2 to render a table of MyModel. MyModel has a few different categories specified by its category field. I want to be able to overwrite order_by such that the table's primary ordering is always category and anything else selected is just a secondary ordering. Any suggestions on how I might do this?

Answer 1

For anyone else with this issue, I eventually got to an answer:

class PersonTable(tables.Table):
    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        def generate_order_func(field_name: str) -> Callable:
            # django-tables2 stamps any secondary ordering if you have a custom ordering function on any of your
            # ordering fields. This adds custom ordering to every field so that name is always the primary
            # ordering 

            def order_func(qs: QuerySet, descending: bool) -> Tuple[QuerySet, bool]:
                # Need custom ordering on deal_state (not alphabetical)
                qs = qs.order_by("name", ("-" if descending else "") + field_name)
                return qs, True

            return order_func

        for field in self._meta.fields:
            setattr(self, f"order_{field}", generate_order_func(field))

        super().__init__(*args, **kwargs)

This overwrites the ordering for each field such that it's ordered by the primary ordering firt.