Ordering of Individual Members is unexpected

[thibaudcolas]

On the Individual Members page and in the Django admin, the sorting of the names seems to ignore spaces. This leads to surprising results when people share a first name (or close), for example:

1. Tim Allen
2. Tim Baxter
3. Tim Graham
4. Tim Kamanin
5. Timo Zimmermann
6. Tim Schilling

I would have expected Timo to either be at the start or (most likely) end of that list, not in the middle.

---

Investigating with @ontowhee, we suspect it’s a matter of how collation is set up (the SQL for the ordering is just ORDER BY "members_individualmember"."name" ASC). Not sure if we want to change the collation on the field with db_collation, or for this specific query.

[ontowhee]

This might not be a bug. There is a similar question posted on stackexchange and a good explanation about how unicode uses weights in its sorting algorithm. This allows names with non-ascii letters to be among those with only ascii letters.

[adamzap]

I can't reproduce this locally, but we could add |dictsort:"name" to the for loop in the template to re-sort the values in Python. That should provide the desired behavior.

I personally don't think it's worth changing the database's collation for this. So my suggestion is to either close it or use dictsort. I'm curious what others think!

[Stormheg]

I'd like to see what collation is currently in use in production for that table/column. My presumption is that it is different from what is considered common by today's standards - given Adam was not able to reproduce this locally. Maybe we want to do something about that, align developer and production environments more.

Worth the effort? Might be; Otherwise adding the dictsort template filter sounds reasonable enough to me.

[adamzap]

@Stormheg That sounds reasonable. Could someone from ops check that for us? Maybe @bmispelon or @tobiasmcnulty? The model is members.models.IndividualMember, and the table for me locally is members_individualmember.

[tobiasmcnulty]

djangoproject=> \l
                                                                     List of databases
              Name              |       Owner        | Encoding | Locale Provider |   Collate   |    Ctype    | Locale | ICU Rules |   Access privileges   
--------------------------------+--------------------+----------+-----------------+-------------+-------------+--------+-----------+-----------------------
<snip>
 djangoproject                  | djangoproject      | UTF8     | libc            | en_US.UTF-8 | en_US.UTF-8 |        |           | 
<snip>

djangoproject=> \d members_individualmember
                                         Table "public.members_individualmember"
       Column       |          Type          | Collation | Nullable |                       Default                       
--------------------+------------------------+-----------+----------+-----------------------------------------------------
 id                 | integer                |           | not null | nextval('members_developermember_id_seq'::regclass)
 name               | character varying(250) |           | not null | 
 email              | character varying(254) |           | not null | 
 member_since       | date                   |           | not null | 
 member_until       | date                   |           |          | 
 reason_for_leaving | text                   |           | not null | 
Indexes:
    "members_developermember_pkey" PRIMARY KEY, btree (id)
    "members_developermember_email_4ac3d0fd6ffd575a_like" btree (email varchar_pattern_ops)
    "members_developermember_email_key" UNIQUE CONSTRAINT, btree (email)
Referenced by:
    TABLE "members_team_members" CONSTRAINT "mem_individualmember_id_3f05fb2b_fk_members_individualmember_id" FOREIGN KEY (individualmember_id) REFERENCES members_individualmember(id) DEFERRABLE INITIALLY DEFERRED