Question

what I’m trying to do is this:

• get the 30 Authors with highest score ( Author.objects.order_by('-score')[:30] )

• order the authors by last_name

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Any suggestions?

Answer 1

What about

import operator

auths = Author.objects.order_by('-score')[:30]
ordered = sorted(auths, key=operator.attrgetter('last_name'))

In Django 1.4 and newer you can order by providing multiple fields.
Reference: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/models/querysets/#order-by

order_by(*fields)

By default, results returned by a QuerySet are ordered by the ordering tuple given by the ordering option in the model’s Meta. You can override this on a per-QuerySet basis by using the order_by method.

Example:

ordered_authors = Author.objects.order_by('-score', 'last_name')[:30]

The result above will be ordered by score descending, then by last_name ascending. The negative sign in front of "-score" indicates descending order. Ascending order is implied.